Cranes

This morning I heard the FAA had given clearance for the Whooping Cranes to fly away from Alabama to Florida, http://www.operationmigration.org/. This is important to me because my twin sister, Merry, follows their path to her state.  In fact, last year she had gone to the town where the whooping cranes land to watch them fly in with the ultralite plane.  However, there was a delay and they were rescheduled.  In the meantime, her husband had a brain tumor and ended up in the hospital, and she missed the landing of the whooping cranes.  Maybe this year.

The only cranes that I see are the Sand Hill Cranes who migrate south in December and January.  They land on the farm fields near me.  They are beautiful birds.  This year Kentucky passed a new hunting law that gave hunters a permit to shoot the Sand Hill Cranes.  I was extremely upset by this.  Are they going to eat these cranes?  NO!  I suppose they will hang them on the walls in their den and have bragging rights.   

This morning after hearing about the Whooping Cranes, I realized that I have incorporated cranes into my art for years.  The image of this is not good as it was taken with a 2.0 digital camera and the whites never did appear white.

This one was painted in 2000.

This was painted in 1999.

I will never understand the mind of a sports hunter, the need to kill for the sake of killing.  I've run several hunters off my farm in the past and will continue to do so.  As a friend said, make sure I don't wear my tan

coat or I may just end up on their den wall, peering back at the hunter with green glass eyes.