Sand Hill Crane and Colt
 

Sand Hill Crane with it's newly hatched Colt.

Aaaw!

Paper, scissors, rock.
 

amen!

Nice
 

Lucky viewing to get a lovely shot. The chick is so small it may be a new hatch. Looks like there is still some egg sitting happening. Beautiful picture. Thanks for sharing.

Satisfied looking parent.

Cool pic, mind sharing where they are nesting?

Sweet.

Too cute! Thanks for posting.

Maybe they don’t want people in their space - let them be

Beautiful!

Wonderful picture
 

Thank you Ron for another amazing nature picture!!!!!

Saw a couple of these Sandhill Cranes digging for food on one of the greens a couple years ago. Lots of damage to the green. Chased them off and called the proshop. Like pitbulls, they are cute when they are young, but can do a lot of damage.

Such majestic looking birds. I will take them any day over the Canadian geese, which are a complete pest in the Midwest.

Great picture! Never saw them that young.

Beautiful picture. Thank you. When they strut across the golf course, our yard or the street, they seem to know that they are a protected species in Florida. Elegant.

What they were doing was inserting their beaks into the green and removing the insect, grub, critter they were looking for.

You know as well as I do that lunching on the green is a very rare occurrence as they have the whole bloomin' golf course and all of the lawns to find their wormies.

They aren't like pitbulls. What they are, are Sandhill Cranes with beautiful long legs and gorgeous bright red heads and they mate for life. My husband and I are doing the "mate for life" and it is working for us. BUT... We didn't have the red heads and HE has the beautiful legs.

Just sayin'.

Thank you.

Re: Canadian geese
In Canada they call them American geese.

I used to photograph weddings. More than once I tried to explain to a bride why they do not want to go to a particular park for pictures. I was never successful at talking them out of it. Hum, at the reception, turn to the left so we do not see the green stains on your white dress.

Actually, most bird species “mate for life,” in that they will raise their brood together year after year, but most of those, both male and female, seek out or accept sex with other birds. They “get some on the side.” (Perhaps it is in the DNA, or at least in the DNA of more than half of all humans and most birds and mammals.)

There is an interesting doctoral dissertation on sandhill cranes available at this government web site. https://www.fws.gov/migratorybirds/p...l%20Cranes.pdf

It seems that while they “mate for life,” a sizable percentage also get divorced! Sometimes that’s because they don’t get along, or because they don’t have breeding success, but sometimes it is because another bird butts in and one of the pair takes off with it. If this happens, they usually move to the nearest available space. (They tend to want almost a kilometer to a family.) I think about three fourths that show up with new mates are re-matings because one of the pair has died, and one fourth of the banded birds examined got divorced. It seems that they nearly always find another mate, preferably not far away. They don’t usually try to live alone in their own territory. “It is not good for birds to be alone.”

Here is a quote from chapter 2 of the dissertation.

Sand Hill Cranes
 

They are just trying to make a living like the rest of us. They were here long before the golf course. As far as I'm concerned they can feed anywhere they want. The golf course can be repaired.

Picture
 

Thank you so much for this fantastic photo! We love the Sandhills and those colts are adorable!

Ohiobuckeye
 

Don’t tell anyone where this neat is,
that’ll be 100 people there all the time! The next thing that will happen is someone will try & walk up to the nest. Let them just enjoy looking at the picture!

Precious! Beautiful picture!💕

Great picture!

Baby crane
 

How did the baby have the strength to get on mommas back after just being born?

Ohiobuckeye
 

That’s the nature of this kind of bird!