The cranes were back this evening

The cranes were back this evening and I spent some more time photgraphing them. They were so close this evening that I got a better look at them and better photos. Then, just now, as I was transferring the pictures to the computer I got all excited because I thought they were Whooping Cranes! Luckily, every entry in my bird book has a list of the birds that you might mistake for the one you're really looking at. So after a minute of looking back and forth between my photos and the picture of the whooping crane in the bird book, I realized that whoopers have a bit of a black "mustache" that extends back from their beaks along their faces underneath their eyes and the birds in my backyard don't. What I have in my backyard are sandhill cranes. They're much more common, but still beautiful to watch and listen to. Here's a picture of a real whooper courtesy of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology (http://www.birds.cornell.edu/AllAboutBirds/BirdGuide/Whooping_Crane.html) and a couple more of my photos so you can see the differences. You can click on my pictures to enlarge them.