Making Sense of the Tsuru

I experienced a eureka moment when editing a series of pictures I recently took on a bicycle trip in the vicinity of Lublin, Poland.

The pictures were of a group of water birds (some species of heron or egret). Looking at these birds taking off and landing in the water, I suddenly realized what the point of tsuru, the traditional origami crane was. Earlier, it always made me wonder why the model was called a crane, since it didn’t resemble a crane at all: I usually saw cranes flying in V formation, and wading birds standing in the water. The tsuru resembled neither of these poses. It seems not only I was confused by the naming, since I’ve heard people call the origami crane a swan, and for me it resembled a swan more than a crane as well. But looking at these pictures, I realized that the name made sense indeed: the landing egret on the left in the first picture is very similar to the tsuru, and so in the one on the right in the second. So it seems the ancients knew what they were doing, after all.

The images are low quality since the birds were much too far away for my lens.