This is an unusual shot. The normal flight pattern of Sandhill Cranes is in a line, with each bird drafting the one ahead, riding the wave of the first birds passage a little above or a little below. They don’t do the V thing geese do, with each bird a body length to the left or right of the leader. In all my flight shots of cranes from this year’s trip to Bosque del Apache, this is the only one where they are stacked up.

Of course, if you look carefully you will see that the highest bird in the stack is actually the second bird down (notice the position of the top bird’s feet under the wing of the second bird), which throws the apparent order into total confusion. I am no longer sure where the birds were in actual relationship to each other. It might actually be two intersecting groups of two, caught as one group passed the other.

Whatever is actually going on, it is a striking image…and there is no escaping the beauty of those huge wings.

Canon SX50HS in Sports Mode. Just under 700mm equivalent field of view. f5.6 @ 1/1250th @ ISO 320. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.

And for the Sunday Thought: I thought I was going to write about the absence of drafting behavior in our kind, until I remembered trucker convoys on the highway, and racing strategy (both bicycle and auto). You would have to consider the first as pretty much the same kind of cooperative drafting as geese and cranes employ, where the lead position rotates through the group to average out and distribute the advantage to the to each individual in the group…and the second as a competitive adaptation of the technique, where individual advantage is taken a the expense of the leader…but both are undoubtedly genuine examples of the behavior in human kind. We do draft one another, when there is enough advantage to be gained. No different than geese and cranes. From my observations of cranes, I even suspect that their drafting behavior is closer to the racers’ than it is to that of the geese and truckers.

I am not certain there is a clear spiritual lesson in there anywhere…or rather, I am pretty certain there is not.

What would spiritual drafting look like? Would it be something like the veneration of the saints…or the orders of religions orders? And which form of drafting would each of those be…cooperative or competitive…geese or crane?

Can we see the spiritual drafting principle in Jesus’ words. “Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.” Can we ride the wave of his passage as the Son flies to the Father and eternity? And do we look like a flock of geese or a line of cranes as we go?

Or maybe we look like a stack of cranes…a rare site indeed…ungainly and unlikely but with the beauty of our wings fully spread?