WELCOME to 2026! Hope your celebration was enjoyable with family and/or friends. Wishing everyone a successful 2026 and that you learned from events in 2025 - we need to keep learning to help us grow, no matter what our age. Hopefully, everyone's holiday season was pleasant and you were able to relax and remove stress from your life.

Thank you to those who took the time to respond with comments and suggestions after last month's message. We have made one major change for this new year, the images are now sized for 4k displays, so depending on the image content, the file sizes will typically be larger than previous images. If you have a problem with the new size, please let me know.

Our first image this month is from Yellowstone National Park, which was captured in the Mammoth Hot Springs Terrace area. The section in this image is the Minerva Terrace and is one of the areas where it is easy to see how Mother Nature has taken over a section. While not visible in this frame, in person, you can see old sections of the walkway handrails that are not nearly fully covered with new travertine. According to the National Park Service, activity shifts dramatically around this terrace and is named for the Roman goddess of artists and sculptors. In the short seven years of multiple visits to the park, I can see that this region is definitely changing quickly, as I know there are some areas that I would not be able to reproduce an image captured previously because the colors are no longer there. Camera Data: 50mm 1/13 sec F13 ISO100

The next image was a surprise capture in more than one way. I had traveled to a new location in Indiana to attempt to capture the annual Sandhill Crane migration. Near the end of the day, I was in an area where numerous birds were flying overhead as they were going to socialize before heading to their roost for the evening. While capturing images, I noticed that one of the birds that flew over had banding on its leg, which seemed odd that a Sandhill Crane was banded. I recalled reading an article on the International Crane Foundation (ICF) website about reporting banded birds but could not recall all the details. Once I had returned home, upon looking at the images captured, I noticed the banded bird was not a Sandhill Crane! A little digging and I discovered I actually photographed a juvenile Whooping Crane, I was extremely happy to learn this as these birds are rare to see, much less photograph. I went to the ICF website and submitted a report of my sighting and after some correspondence back and forth, I was able to learn more about this particular bird. Those details are in the next paragraph; this was a very special day, even if I learned about what I captured a few days later. Camera Data: 560mm 1/1000 sec F5.6 ISO1600

From the ICF - "Information on the bird you saw, 35_25 is a first-year bird that hatched this summer at our headquarters in Baraboo, WI. Every year, we hatch and raise a cohort of Whooping Cranes to release into our Eastern Migratory Population (EMP) in Wisconsin. This reintroduction effort was started in 2001 and involved raising Whooping Crane chicks (also called colts) in costume to avoid them imprinting on humans. From 2001-2016, the released birds were led to Florida on their winter migration via ultralight aircraft in a project known as Operation Migration; however, by 2016, there were enough adults in the population to teach newly released chicks the migration route and the use of the aircraft was stopped. Each year, our cohort of captive-reared chicks gets a theme for names, and this year's theme was dinosaurs, with 35_25 being aptly named Sinclair.  In the EMP, as of 1 December 2025, there are 65 wild birds. In the world, there are ~800 Whooping Cranes with approximately 650 in the wild and 150 in captivity. With only ~25 birds left in the world in the 1940s, this is definitely a big improvement, but there is still lots of work to be done." What is kind of amazing is the fact I was able to capture a few images on the fly over but also the fact that there were an estimated 10,000 Sandhill Cranes in the area, so seeing this young bird is extra special. If you want to learn more about the Whooping Cranes or the Foundation, visit https://savingcranes.org

Here's a link to download the appropriate version of this month's image for your desktop, one for standard screens and one for wide-screens, along with a Mobile Phone Image. For desktop computers or tablets, open the required version for your device, right-click on the image or right-click on the text for the format you need and select Save As, save to a location on your device and change the background as needed for your OS.

For Mobile devices, most mobile phones require a long press and a menu pop-up will be displayed. Click save then follow the steps for your operating system to set it as your background image.

http://www.timlesterimages.com/calendar/january.html

Enjoy the images this month and let me know if you have any questions or comments!

Tim Lester

TIM LESTER IMAGES
Email: tim@PROTECTED
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