Last month my friend Shawn McCully and I traveled to Oklahoma primarily to photograph the greater and lesser prairie chickens on their leks. It was 93 degrees when we got off the plane! We worked our way to the Tall Grass Prairie for an early morning date with the greater prairie chickens using blinds that were already set up. The unfortunate thing is that spring was about 3 weeks early there and most of the females were already on nests. The fortunate thing is that 2 males reported to the lek and one of them put on a show right in front of our blinds. We then worked our way toward Woodward (where the tornado killed 6 people earlier in the spring) where we spent time at a lesser prairie chicken lek. The action here was better with 12 males reporting for action. We spent time in the blind early in the morning and again later in the afternoon - fortunately. The next day there was a heavy down-pour and the blind visits were cancelled.
Our secondary goal was to find and photograph as many other species as we could, given the time constraints and the fact that we had never been to any of these areas before. We saw many species but found it difficult to get the kind of images we wanted. For example, we saw many cardinals but they were either at the very tops of trees or lurking in fairly heavy cover. None-the-less, we came home with hundreds of images, many of which I am still sorting through. I have created an Oklahoma gallery on my website where you can see images of some of the birds we encountered. More will be added as I get to them.

Next month Gregg Thompson and I are going to Barrow, AK for a week with a long list of birds we hope to see and photograph. Should be a fun adventure.
Regards
Bob Kothenbeutel
website: www.rlkimages.photoshelter.com