I saw some pretty spectacular birds last year. I mean, a couple of days ago. At the end of 2022. The 26th of December 2022 is the exact date.
So yes, I saw these remarkable birds, but only from a distance. Without my camera's pretty good zooming capability, I wouldn't have been able to see enough details to identify them.
Here you can see a pretty heavy crop of the previous photograph. First I zoomed in to get the picture, and then I had to crop the thing to make the birds easily recognizable. These are the Eurasian cranes (Grus grus) on their way to some flooded, swampy habitat. I remember, long ago, when I was a kid, a group of ten to twenty cranes landed near the pond not far from my house. That was the only time I saw these birds relatively up close in nature.
Here I zoomed out so you can see their flight formation that conserves energy. Each bird, by moving its wings, is creating lift for other birds in the flock, allowing them to fly with less effort. When a bird, a crane in this case but other species use the same strategy, falls out of formation, it quickly realizes that it takes a lot more energy to fly alone.
The formation can get slightly broken from time to time. For various reasons, I guess. In this case, it looked like the birds were maneuvering to change their direction.
The Eurasian cranes have a loud trumpeting call. That's how I noticed them. I thought I'm hearing the seagulls at first, but only for a moment, it was soon clear that the distant celestial trumpets are produced by something else. So I took the camera to use its lens as binoculars. And after three to five minutes of observing the birds, I got enough material for a quick post.
It was a short encounter, so the post can't be long. It ends here. That's all for today.
AS ALWAYS HERE ON HIVE, THE PHOTOGRAPHS ARE MY WORK.
