On several occasions I've had the experience of taking photos of one bird and accidentally taking a photo of a different bird I'd rather of had a photo of. That just happened to me in northern California at the Lower Klamath National Wildlife Refuge.
I was taking photos of a red-tailed hawk in a tree,
then it flew and I was taking photos of it flying. In the flight photos the red-tailed hawk is blurry and background sandhill cranes are more in focus (although not perfectly in focus). The photos have all been cropped to some degree. The first three photos show cropped versions of the photos with the out-of-focus hawk. The next three photos show more extensively cropped photos with just the sandhill crane.
I've only seen sandhill cranes once before, in Florida. I'm thrilled I got these photos, but really wish I'd been able to focus on photos of the sandhill cranes instead.
The Lower Klamath NWR gets about 80% of the migrating waterfowl on the Pacific Flyway on both spring and fall migrations. It was the first refuge established in the U.S., in 1908, by Teddy Roosevelt. At its peak it can have 1.8 million birds, anywhere from 15% to 45% of all birds wintering in California. And pertinent to this post, it is a fall staging area for 20% to 30% of the central valley population of sandhill crane.
The crane is so big that it is hard to believe you didn't notice it back there! It reminds me of that video where a man in a gorilla suit walks through a crowd, but the viewer is focused on something else in the video and doesn't usually notice the gorilla. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJG698U2Mvo
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