Platte River - Crane Sounds

"Platte River to the Sound of the Cranes" 6x8 oil on Linen

It was that damp kind of cold today...to the bones! But I could not resist getting out of the car to paint this one...I had to stop when my hands got clumsy and I knocked over my little container of walnut oil...but I gathered info that will help me paint a big one from the drab photos I took :)

Most of the 1GB of pics on the camera were of the 400,000 sandhill cranes coming in to roost on the river....wow...this spectacle near Grand Island, NE is known as one of the 10 biggest wildlife spectacles in the world! My artist friend Marilyn Bower and I were lucky that is was yukky weather, because people backed out of the tour and we got to take their place in the "blind"...a couple of hours at sundown, watching these magnificent birds gather for the night. In a couple of days they will rise from te water for the last time this year, to fly north...some of them all the way beyond Alaska into siberia, for a total flight distance of 5,000. Today, I am a crane expert...tomorrow is my u-Haul trip back to Texas :)