This shot happened on my last night on assignment. I was working on a story about the Ogallala Aquifer near Wood River, Nebraska. That area is one of the few places in the sandhill crane's migration that still has meandering streams. Cranes, salmon, and many other critters need meandering streams to thrive. Cranes especially want to bed down in shallow water. This is a spot where these birds can all land and be together. That evening, there were more cranes than had ever been counted before—as many as 413,000.

So that night I bedded down in the blind, which is basically a cold, plywood shack. I usually photographed cranes in the morning because they would land at night and