Cranes in Cornfield, cell phone photo ©
2007 by ybonesy. All rights reserved.
Actually, I saw a crane yesterday
from seat 9F (window, over the wing)
of my US Airways flight into San Jose,
California.
I wondered if it was
the same crane
I saw last time I was in San Jose.
Last night I was at a restaurant
Pappizani or something Italian,
work colleagues.
Talk turned to family and before you know it
everyone whipped out their cell phones
and passed around pictures of their kids.
I’m not a photographer
But I am a talker
That’s how I got the shot of the cranes in a cornfield
one morning last week
on my way to work
stopping at the library to drop off an overdue book.Otherworldly gutteral cooing of long-throated cranes
in the field next door
hundreds of cranes
Agh, where is my camera when I need it?
Cell phone camera shots can be art.
I’m not saying mine are.Thou art art
AR-AR-AR
Off with me now.
I’m in San Jose
Just popped in to say Hey.
p.s., Thanks to bloomgal for sending me the cell-phone-art URL. I’ve been wanting to use it for some time.
p.s.s., Do you know the way to San Jose, dah-dah-dah-dah-dah–DAHDAHDAHDAH…
p.s.s.s., Just wanted to get that diddy tucked into your heads tonight 8)
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Hi ybonesy! OMG, when I saw your post, that song was already going through my head like a train. This is a cool post. Love the poetry. (Good use of space, too.)
They really passed around cell phone photos of their kids? So cell phones are the new scrapbook, keychain, wallet pic? Fascinating.
That camera art link is pretty cool. You are inspiring me. 8)
I’m lightly humming…do you know the way to San Jose….la, la, la, la, la la…LALALALA.
Are those the sandhill cranes that migrated south to New Mexico for the winter?
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For ybonesy, a little San Jose surprise (LINK) 8)
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I keep seeing everyone’s great shots of cranes – Jana has some fantastic ones on Flickr – I keep saying I need to get outside more!
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bloomgal, Thanks for pointing us to Jana’s sandhill cranes. Wow, those are some amazing shots. Maybe you could do some abstracts of crane impressions.
ybonesy, you’ve got to show me the cranes sometime. I’d come all the way out to New Mexico just to see them. Ever since seeing the Nebraska migration, I fell in love the prehistoric sandhills.
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Jana’s shots are amazing!! Thanks for pointing us to them, bloomgal.
QM, the cranes are incredible. They are so prehistoric, everything about them. There’s a place you can go where they gather by the hundreds. It’s a big field that is a corn maze during the fall, and then in the winter, once the corn is tamped down, the cranes and geese and ducks gather. It’s near my house. But they’re all along the bosque, too. You can hear them and see them all the month of Dec, into Jan also.
QM, I listened to the Dionne Warwick video. She sang that song like no one else. (Did anyone else sing it?? I don’t even know. Probably a lot of people did.)
I love the song “I Know I’ll Never Love This Way Again” by her also.
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Do I dare admit this? I had a double record set of Dionne (as she was called back then – you never used her last name) that I listened to all the time in junior high. By then I had graduated to another light green RCA stereo turntable (with detachable speakers) that my parents gave me for Christmas (one of the best presents ever). That was the year we drove all the way down to Georgia, presents in tow, and spent Christmas with my grandmother. I even remember one of the albums I got that year was the Turtles. 8)
At the time, Dionne was one of THE superstars of music (outside of the rock genre, of course). Her old work is fantastic. And teaming up with David/Bacharach catapulted her career. Her voice and their music/lyrics tug at the heartstrings.
I think she won a Grammy for Do You Know The Way To San José. I found covers by the following in Wiki (not always a reliable source, but one I use often to kickstart a subject and is usually pretty accurate in cases like this):
The George Shearing Quintet, The Avalanches, The Baja Marimba Band, The Temptations & The Supremes together, Frankie Goes to Hollywood, The Starlite Orchestra, De Phazz, The Carpenters, the Ian Levine-produced group Croisette, and Stunt Monkey, a local San José punk band. Recently, this song has been covered by a local San Jose rapper. Warwick herself recorded a new salsa version of the song in 1998 along with Celia Cruz.
I hope to see the sandhills in New Mexico some day. I was showing Liz this post and Jana’s photos of the cranes over morning coffee. I hope people are checking out the blueskydesert link. Beautiful shots of the cranes against the Sandias.
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Wow, The Carpenters? I wonder how they sounded. (I know, I can probably look up on You Tube ; – ).
One of the things I wondered in the Dionne link you found (Do You Know the Way to San Jose) was, were the men she was featured with in that montage her collaborators or her lovers or both? One was Tony Bennett, right?
I also found her to be so beautiful, but in a different way. Very catlike in her eyes. Her upper lip created a dark line that I found to be so unusual and exotic. Ah, but brilliant voice. Brilliant singing. Effortless.
QM, when you come to NM to see the cranes, bring Liz. And, yes, Jana’s photos are so cool. She’s only been taking photos for about a year, and she has such a great eye. Natural talent.
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ybonesy,
When I was taking classes at New Mexico Tech in Socorro, I ride my road bike down to the Bosque del Apache south of San Antonio hoping to catch a glimpse of any cranes. It was alway the wrong time of year (summer).
Tania’s and my new condo is on the corner of the sea and a little lagoon we call “Lake Horrible”. Lake Horrible is home to white egrets and every so often I’ll be lucky and see a scarlet ibis. The scarlet ibis is an unbelievable red color. Very beautiful. Once when paddling my kayak in the see, I happened to look up and saw a whole flock fly over head in a V-formation. It was awesome!
I’ve also been lucky enough to see flocks of flamingo V’s flying across the sky. They are very big, a nice pink color against the blue sky. Their necks straight out and legs straight back. Like flying crosses. Very cool!
MM
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YB,
What a perfect description of the sounds the cranes make…”Otherworldly, gutteral cooing,” not only accurate, but very poetic, as well!
QM,
Thanks for putting the San Jose song on, I enjoyed it too…been a very long time since I heard it. I always liked the unusual phrasing and beat of Bacharach’s music, and Dionne was the best choice to sing them!
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With that picture, it looked just right for another one of the color writes. Gold or Goldenrod.
I thought the ending of your poem was very… (and sorry if this isn’t a good word to use, but)… cute.
It was cute.
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I saw some kind of white crane at the base of Mt. Washington in NH once. It was beautiful!
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Beautiful. I’ll have to look up in my birding book what a white crane is. I’m confused, too, about the heron. It looks like a crane, I think.
The man we bought this place from monitored bird life for a year, and he noted groups of crane that stopped in. (Jim and I have not seen any so far this winter.) Also a blue heron. And lots of other things. The list was three pages long. We see lots of hawks, and right now hundreds of Sonoran Ravens, which I love. They gang up on the hawks. Don’t hurt them but stave them off that way.
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Thanks, amuirin. I like cute. Yes, it was a Goldenrod morning for sure.
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LB, the white bird could have been an egret (usually white) or a whooping crane (more rare). I saw a whooping crane once on a birding trip to see the sandhill cranes in Nebraska. All these birders were stopped at the intersection of three cornfields, all with the binocs out and we happened upon them. What a bonus! It’s rare to see whooping cranes these days. There are only about 200 left in the wild.
ybonesy, I always have to look up the difference between egrets, herons, and cranes. I can never remember. We have tons of egrets and herons in Minnesota. The cranes are not as common (to me) and usually pass through on their way to somewhere else.
Herons and egrets are similar and fly with heads pulled back and a crook in their necks. They’ve both got yellowish beaks. Egrets are in the same family as herons but smaller and usually white. Both tend to hang out in small groups. The cattle egret’s kind of an interesting chap.
Cranes are about the size of herons but fly with straight necks. They tend to hang out and feed in flocks and are a different family altogether.
I hope I have all this right. Don’t take my word for it. You can read the rest for yourself. Here are a few links. I’m on the fly!
Egrets & Herons at Clemson Edu (LINK)
Answer Bag – What’s the difference between a heron and a crane (LINK)
Tule Ponds at Tyson (LINK)
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Marylin, glad you liked the Dionne link. Did you see that Bacharach TV special that came out, I think, within the last 5 years? They had all these people singing his songs. I remember Five For Fighting. And I think Dionne also came on and they reunited for a few songs. It was kind of cool.
I’m pretty sure I bought the box collection of famous musicians singing his songs after that. Liz laughed when she saw it in my CD collection; but she graciously puts up with my affinity for the romantic old music of my youth! 8)
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