Sandhill cranes

I'm in New Mexico now with a photo tour, and today we captured the stunning sandhill cranes at Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge. At sunset we had many hundreds of cranes as well as snow geese flying in beautiful light. About an hour before sunset the gibbous moon rose in the eastern sky, and I thought it would be great to include both the moon and the birds in a single image. The problem, of course, is all of my bird photography was done with either a 500mm or 700mm (the 500mm plus a 1.4x teleconverter) focal length, thus the background was always out of focus. The only way to make a picture like this is to take two images -- the birds and then the moon -- and assemble them in Photoshop. Many times cranes flew in front of the moon, but due to the optical limitations of our lenses, it was simply impossible to render both elements
sharp . . . even though we see it that way. My settings for the cranes were 1/3200, f/11, and 2500 ISO, and I hand held the camera and long lens.