This was a day trip with the Fort Worth Audubon Society on their first annual Whooping Crane Watch, to watch for migrating Whooping Cranes on their way to the gulf coast of Texas. Over the past few years it has been noted that they make stopovers in the same areas on their way south, so using past dates as a guide the FWAS picked the first weekend in November to do their watch & had a great turn out with approximately 40 birders.
There were to be four teams in four different locations. However, the night before 5 adult Whooping Cranes appeared on Lake Weatherford, the same site they had visited on Halloween 2 years before! So all the team members now congregated at this one location first thing in the morning and were rewarded with 5 beautiful Whooping Cranes! They stayed until 9:35am giving everyone great looks & vocalizations before flying off & may well have reached the coast by the end of the day.
Photos taken (through a scope) on November 1st 2003 on Lake Weatherford, TX.