Sandhill Cranes

I heard sandhill cranes this past weekend when clearing the dam and when collecting and cutting up brush from around trees in our "yard" area. 

This pile near the house is "a drop in the bucket" compared to the one we just made near the lower barn.

Once you've identified their strange, trilling, and trumpeting call once, there is no mistaking sandhill cranes when you hear them again. I paused several times in my work, scanning the sky for their long necks and trailing legs, their wide, wide wings.

Sandhill cranes are large. They weigh about 10 pounds. Their wing span is about 6 feet across, and they stand at about 3 and a half feet tall. Their red eye "masks" and 5 inch bills make them look fairly formidable. They are impressive creatures.

Their footprints are nearly half as long as my husband's, who wears size 9.

Hearing them made me long to go to Ewing Bottoms (just west of Brownstown, Indiana) to see them again. Thousands stop there, and spread out here and there in the fields and ditches along the river to feed and rest during their migration.

  

We went every year for many in a row. Often snow was falling.
Frequently there was fog.

Groups of several hundred would be foraging in the fields, some of them "dancing" by bowing, throwing corn stalks in the air, jumping, and flinging their wings wide as part of their mating ritual. The shrill and trilling sounds of so many birds permeated the air. More could always be heard than seen. New groups of birds were always arriving. And if you stood very still and were silent, they would fly right over you when they did. It was lovely.

But it was time consuming. It was a long drive to get to the general area in which they convene. And often, once in the area, it took quite a bit of driving to find a flock near enough to observe well. My little ones have never liked being in the car. And now that we have moved here, we live another hour away...

Soon the many trees, shrubs, thorny thickets, etc. will leaf out here, and the much needed clearing around trees, along fence lines, and on the backside of the dam will be much harder, if not impossible. After the clearing, there's fencing that needs installed, and coop fortification on the list, among many other things. We need to spend most spare daylight minutes trying to get the place in shape, at least at first. So there was no luxury of an annual birding expedition this year. 

Yesterday my son heard them again, despite playing music in the stone room while working on his school work. They are that loud. He quickly came to find me, excited by the raucous bugling he heard, happy that he knew what the noise was. And I know that some day we will go back to see them.

"There is symbolic as well as actual beauty in the migration of the birds... There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature -- the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after the winter..." 
- Rachel Carson (1907-1964) marine biologist, nature writer, environmentalist