Sandhill Cranes, Platte River - with video

For millions of years, cranes have migrated through what is now south central Nebraska on their way to breeding grounds in the north. I was honored to witness the spectacle of sandhill cranes gathering on the Platte River in late March. At sunset the cranes fly in by the thousands from the fields to roost on the river overnight; at dawn they rise in groups both small and large, and disperse to glean grain from the late-winter fields. Some half a million cranes pass through there, in the vicinity of Kearney, Nebraska, from late February to early April each year. The sight and primordial sound of hundreds or thousands of cranes, with the backdrop of some of the most beautiful sunsets and sunrises I have ever seen, will long stay with me. So will the moment when a clamorous group we were watching, at some signal undetectable by us, went completely silent. A few breathless moments passed -- and then they lifted en masse into the sky.

Turn up the volume on the video to hear the cranes.

Rereading Laura Ingalls Wilder - as a Birder

I happily read Laura Ingalls Wilder's "Little House" series at least a couple of times as a kid and again as my children got to suitable ages. Recently, having encouraged Dave to read them since he never had, I picked them up again myself.

I find myself reading the story of this sturdy, closely knit pioneer family's travels and travails in the last quarter of the 19th century with new eyes -- the eyes of a birdwatcher, aspiring naturalist and conservationist who newly understands the role that grasslands have played in the North American circle of life and the sad fact that we have been plowing up more and more of them -- starting in the very times of which she wrote -- until native grasslands are almost gone from huge areas of the U.S. landscape.

Though Wilder, with the help of her daughter Rose Wilder Lane, wrote these books decades after the times she describes, they are as close to a contemporary eyewitness perspective on the pioneer experience in those places and times as we have in our popular literature. While the focus of the stories is on family life, she captures a wonderful amount of detail of the world they inhabited.

1939 edition of By the Shores of Silver Lake,
illustrations by Helen Sewell and Mildred Boyle
Photo credit: Bramblewood Fashion blog

Here is one passage, so evocative of the land and its wealth of bird life. Imagine yourself in Dakota Territory in about 1880, newly arrived in a railroad shanty town where your father has taken a temporary job as shopkeeper while your family looks for an ideal homesteading site. Almost 13 years old, you are exploring the lakeshore with your sisters on a summer afternoon:

Laura and Mary and Carrie walked slowly along on the green shore by the rippling silver-blue water, toward the wild Big Slough. The grasses were warm and soft to their feet. The wind blew their flapping skirts tight against their bare legs and ruffled Laura's hair. Mary's sunbonnet and Carrie's were tied firmly under their chins, but Laura swung hers by its strings. Millions of rustling grass-blades made one murmuring sound, and thousands of wild ducks and geese and herons and cranes and pelicans were talking sharply and brassily in the wind.

All those birds were feeding among the grasses of the sloughs. They rose on flapping wings and settled again, crying news to each other and talking among themselves among the grasses, and eating busily of grass roots and tender water plants and little fishes. 

The lake shore went lower and lower toward Big Slough, until really there was no shore. The lake melted into the slough, making small ponds surrounded by the harsh, rank slough grass that stood five and six feet tall. Little ponds glimmered between the grasses and on the water the wild birds were thick.

As Laura and Carrie pushed into the slough grasses, suddenly harsh wings ripped upward and round eyes glittered; the whole air exploded in a noise of squawking, quacking, quonking. Flattening their webbed feet under their tails, ducks and geese sped over the grass-tops and curved down to the next pond. ...

The soft, cool mud sucked around her ankles as she stood, and before her the little ponds glimmered among the tall grasses. She wanted to go on and on, into the slough among the wild birds, but she could not leave Mary and Carrie. So she turned back with them to the hard, higher prairie where waist-high grasses were nodding and bending in the wind, and the short, curly buffalo grass grew in patches.

Along the edge of the slough they picked flaming red tiger lilies, and on higher ground they gathered long branching stems of purple buffalo bean pods. Grasshoppers flew up like spray before their feet in the grasses. All kinds of little birds fluttered and flew and twittered balancing in the wind on the tall, bending grass stems, and prairie hens scuttled everywhere. 

A few weeks later, it's autumn:

The weather grew colder and the sky was full of wings and great birds flying. From East to West, from North to South, and as far up into the blue sky as eyes could see, were birds and birds and birds sailing on beating wings.

 At evening down they came endlessly from the sky, sliding down long slopes of air to rest on the water of Silver Lake.

There were great, gray geese. There were smaller, snow-white brant that looked like snow at the water's edge. There were ducks of many kinds, the large mallards with a shimmering of purple and green on their wings, the redheads, the bluebills, the canvasbacks, and teals and many others whose names Pa did not know. There were herons, and pelicans, and cranes. There were little mud-hens, and the small hell-divers [grebes -- I had to look that one up!] that peppered the water thickly with their little black bodies. When a shot cracked, hell-divers up-ended and vanished quicker than winking. They went far down in the water and stayed there a long time.

At sunset the whole large lake was covered with birds speaking in every kind of bird's voice to each other before they went to sleep for a night of rest on their long journey from north to south. The winter was driving them; the winter was coming behind them from the north.

-- By the Shores of Silver Lake, by Laura Ingalls Wilder  (c) 1939, renewed 1967.

Wilder's writing puts you right there -- hearing the sounds of thousands of birds, and feeling the wind against your bare legs and the warm grass and soft mud under your bare feet. I'll leave you with those passages, for now, but I may be back with more. Though the books reflect some historical views on Native Americans by European settlers (held noticeably less by the main character, Laura, than by certain others around her) that can be disturbing from a modern perspective, they are well worth reading at any age.

Western Grebes, North Dakota 2014

Sandhill Cranes at Sherburne NWR (Video)

I was itchin' to go birding somewhere today while the weather was still mild, and thanks to a couple of blogging friends who mentioned sandhill cranes recently (see Dan Tallman's Bird Blog and Nature Knitter), I'd heard that the cranes have been congregating in large numbers in places like Sherburne National Wildlife Refuge in central Minnesota and at Crex Meadows in Wisconsin. We decided to head to the closer of these, Sherburne NWR, to see if we could spot some cranes. The refuge is north of Elk River and Zimmerman, to the northwest of the Twin Cities metro area, about 90 minutes' drive from Northfield.

I've seen sandhill cranes before -- here and there in fields in central Wisconsin last month, for example, while driving to visit our daughter at Lawrence University -- but only a few at a time. The idea of seeing them congregating in large numbers, staging for their upcoming migration south, was an exciting prospect.

The Sherburne NWR website has a nice guide to where to view sandhill cranes, and it was right on target. We started to see some in the air, and then came upon a field where many dozens were foraging, joined almost every minute by new groups of anywhere from three to eight or more gliding in from the east. At a conservative count there must have been at least 300 cranes there while we watched. Here is a short video of some of the cranes on the ground and others flying in. I love how their long legs dangle as they come in. Toward the end of the video you can hear their calls.

 

 Here are some photos as well.

We also saw a pair of swans fly by.

This was my first trip to Sherburne, and I look forward to exploring it further when it's not deer hunting season. We saw a lot of trucks pulled over and quite a bit of blaze orange hunting gear. We stayed in our car, needless to say.

We've talked about going to Nebraska's Platte River Valley flyway to witness the spring migration of half a million sandhill cranes, considered one of the most amazing experiences in birding anywhere. Dave's seen it, and I'd love to. Getting just a taste of it today has whetted my appetite for that trip even more.

Whooping Cranes near Northfield

Two rare whooping cranes have been hanging out in a field and a nearby wetland on Old Dutch Road west of Northfield for several days -- I'm not sure whether they are still in the area. When we heard about them on Friday, they had been already spotted the previous two days as well. These photos were taken Friday; on Saturday we looked again in the late afternoon and saw only one. If you go looking for them, do not trespass into the field or wetland, and be careful not to disturb the cranes.

Information about this breeding pair of cranes, based on the visible bands in photos examined by a representative of the International Crane Foundation in Wisconsin, is given in Dan Tallman's Bird Blog. They have been together for about three years and are part of a flock that breeds in Wisconsin and winters in Florida.

More background on these highly endangered birds appears in my post Whooping Cranes from last May. At that time two birds (I don't know if they were the same pair seen this week) were seen near Dennison, on the other side of Northfield.

Whooping Cranes

On our recent drive to Ohio for my elder daughter's college graduation, we stopped in Wisconsin at the International Crane Foundation so my recently-bird-fanatic son could see the magnificent birds they keep and breed there. We got some exceptionally nice views of the two whooping cranes that were in the exhibit area, partly helped by my discovery that the enhanced digital zoom on my camera is not totally useless for birds, at least when they are large and relatively close.

Coincidentally, when we returned home Sunday evening we found multiple phone and email alerts from friends telling us that two whooping cranes had been in a wet field near Dennison, Minnesota (just a few miles from Northfield) for the previous two days. Dan Tallman's Bird Blog devoted a blog post to them on Monday, and here is a video that an acquaintance of mine, Lisa Graff, took while they were here, showing distinctive leaping and wing-flapping courtship behavior. (Great capture, Lisa!)



Whooping cranes were also spotted last summer at the McKnight Prairie in Carleton College's Cowling Arboretum. With these multiple sightings, it is tempting to hope that the greater Northfield area may become a regular visiting spot for these birds from the Wisconsin population (see more below).

Now one of the rarest birds on earth, the whooping crane once occupied North America from central Canada to Mexico and from Utah to the Atlantic. Due to loss of habitat, hunting and egg collection, the population dwindled until only one natural, self-sustaining flock remained. In the 1970s and '80s, there was an attempt to foster whooping crane eggs with much more robust sandhill crane populations, but it did not result in successful pair-bonding among the fostered whooping cranes and so the project was abandoned. According to the International Crane Foundation's whooping crane page:

In 1999, governmental, non-profit, and private organizations united to form the Whooping Crane Eastern Partnership (WCEP) to establish a new, migratory flock of Whooping Cranes to the core part of their historic breeding range. This flock migrates between Wisconsin and coastal Florida. To re-establish a migration route that was completely lost, the chicks are conditioned to follow an ultralight aircraft at the Necedah National Wildlife Refuge in central Wisconsin. The aircraft guides them on their first migration south. In the fall, the young Whooping Cranes and a team of pilots and biologists begin the 1200 mile journey to Chassahowitzka National Wildlife Refuge in Florida. The birds spend the winter in Florida and return unassisted to Wisconsin in the spring. In 2006, this flock numbered over 60 birds.

Horribly, three young, banded, transmitter-bearing whooping cranes from this precarious population, on their first migration to Florida, were shot and killed in Georgia this past December, and two more suffered the same fate in Alabama in February, despite being protected by the Endangered Species Act, state laws and the federal Migratory Bird Treaty Act. Rewards are being offered for information leading to arrests and successful prosecution in these cases. Two men (one a minor) who shot two whoopers in Indiana in 2009 recently received only probation, court fees and a $1 fine for the offense, and were never charged with violations of federal law. Apparently the pair were out indiscriminately shooting whatever animals they saw, "kind of like target practice," according to the article in the preceding link. It is heartbreaking to consider the effects of such thoughtlessness not only on the tiny whooping crane population but also on those who have invested so much of themselves in the rearing and training of these precious cranes.

I encourage your support of the International Crane Foundation, whose website is savingcranes.org. I'll close here with a short video of the two cranes at the ICF.

International Crane Foundation Visit

Two weeks ago, on the way back from delivering our college student to Ohio for her senior year, we stopped in Baraboo, Wisconsin, to visit the International Crane Foundation. This is the only place on earth where you can see all 15 species of crane -- majestic birds, some of which, like the Siberian Crane, are critically endangered because of loss of habitat and disruption of migration. Our time was limited and so we didn't see them all. Here are a few. I encourage you to follow the links to learn more about each.

Grey Crowned Crane (East and South Africa)

Side view of the Grey Crowned Crane

Brolga (Australia)

Sarus Crane (India) - Note that this bird, tallest of the cranes, is looking me right in the eye, if not down on me

Wattled Crane (Subsaharan Africa)

Demoiselle Crane (Asia)

Siberian Crane - note the light yellow eye, so eerie against the pink of the face