I shot aerials over a series of days with a whooping crane survey crew, aiming to document whooping cranes on their nesting territories with chicks. A record number of twins hatched this year. Their nesting grounds are a maze of polygon-shaped wetlands in a remote boreal plains wilderness. Wood Buffalo is nearly six times larger than Yellowstone and is the third-largest national park in the world.

I was embedded with a whooping crane capture team working by helicopter to locate, capture, band, and release whooping crane chicks after affixing telemetry devices to their legs. These transmitters will track the birds for more than three years of their lives. The team successfully placed 17 new transmitters on young whoopers who will attempt their first southward migration this fall.

The process is physically and mentally exhausting. Each capture is a game of seek and find, followed by a race against time.

I pulled the two whooping crane nest timelapse cameras we had placed earlier—and both worked! Roughly 5,500 images were captured by each camera over six weeks. The team also extracted ten sets of scientific research cameras and recorders capturing timelapse, video, and acoustic data, including those placed alongside my own. Both nests hatched chicks on the same day—June 10—and both pairs left their nests for good on June 13.

I also swapped out memory cards on two landscape timelapse cameras installed in April. These were the final two of a dozen timelapse cameras I’ve placed between nesting grounds and wintering grounds along the whooping crane’s 2,500-mile migration pathway.

In addition to the cranes, I photographed a herd of rare wood bison—the namesake of the national park—along with assorted landscapes, plant life, and wildlife. I also captured hours of video on my iPhone and through video goggles while working with the crane capture crews.