It was almost 5 am, well below freezing, and I was clumsily trying to attach my camera to my tripod with gloved fingers. The last of the stars had finally given way to the growing light in the eastern sky, but the sun wouldn’t be up for a while yet.
A class of a dozen photography students arrived and began setting up their cameras next to me. Their fancy lenses dwarfed mine. Not for the first time, I wondered what in the world I was doing here!
Of course, I’d love to be back in bed sound asleep, or at least in the coffee shop with a nice hot cup of tea, but 50,000 snow geese, glistening white in their winter plumage, were sleeping on the wetlands in front of me. At some point in the next hour or so, the growing daylight would reach a critical intensity, and the entire flock would lift off as one, circle overhead, and then fly off into the new day. I wasn’t about to miss it.
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