Greater Prairie Chicken Face Off – Knoza Prairie – Manhattan, Kansas

Took a 3-day trip to Canadian, Texas and Manhattan, Kansas for Lesser and Greater Prairie Chicken last week. It wasn’t a great trip despite having them up close shooting from blinds. I have not taken any bird images on the ground off eye-level for years, let alone 3-4 feet high from the ground.

What a pity. It could have been thousand of great images but ended up with couple of keepers.

This is a pair of Greater Prairie Chicken face off on terrible stormy morning at Knoza Prairie – Manhattan, Kansas. With dark cloud covered the sky most of the morning, i approached them in lower ISO, low shutter static settings, then boost the color and contrast in post processing.

The Lek where the Prairie Chickens dance is inside barbed wire fences, and we were shooting though the fences which makes the situation worst because the wires were in the way. So having a long supertele len is necessary to blur out the wire if you plan for a visit.