Last fall, I intercepted and photographed whoopers during migration in the Rainwater Basins of south-central Nebraska. This spring, they returned. The Rainwater Basins are critically important for migrating birds, but roughly 95 percent of these native wetlands and grasslands have been drained and plowed under.

One of the largest protected wetlands is near the town of Funk, Nebraska—population 100—next to where my dad spent summers as a boy, working on his aunt and uncle’s family farms. The farms were homesteaded by my dad’s relatives in the late 1800s, and his descendants still farm there today.

I hadn’t planned to photograph whoopers this spring until I got a call from the refuge manager, who said he was looking at a “few” whoopers that had just landed on the property. Over the course of the afternoon, a few turned into a “handful,” and a handful eventually turned into a “bunch”—17 total. The birds included banded and unbanded individuals, as well as singles, pairs, and families.

They stayed for a few days on two newly restored wetlands, infused with water diverted from the Platte River to ensure habitat for migrating birds. Most of the intimate, eye-level photos of whoopers I captured were taken from a tiny blind where I stayed overnight, near one of the restored wetlands where the cranes roosted.