Sandhill Cranes
I visited the Crex Meadows State Wildlife Area near Grantsburg, Wisconsin on two days in November, 2022 to photograph sandhill cranes. Crex Meadows is in the southern part of the sandhills’ breeding range that extends all the way north into the Canadian and Alaskan arctic.
Richard Powers in his novel The Echo Maker describes crane behavior much better than I could ever hope to. On my first November day at Crex, “the sky slips from peach to garnet to blood. A thread ripples across the light; a kettle of cranes home in from nowhere. They make a sound, prehistoric, too loud and carrying for their body size”. Upon entering Crex Meadows, I heard the prehistoric squawking of cranes as soon as I entered the refuge. They seemed miles away in the northern part of the refuge. I followed the sound a few miles north and found the cranes in a small, unharvested corn field, the only cultivated area in Crex Meadows. The birds were excited, leaping into the air, flying a bit, coming back to earth, making their cacophonous noise.
When I went back a few days later, the birds had moved south into the refuge’s marshes and shallow ponds. There seemed to be kettles coming in continuously from where they had been feeding in harvested, farm fields outside the refuge. After having paired off in the spring, the cranes were congregating; forming flocks for the trip south. They seemed to be practicing or maybe just having fun, soaring upward in kettles of two or three dozen birds. When flying, their “Necks stretched out while legs dangle behind, and in the middle, the slight bulge of body, like a child suspended between strings. In threaded clumps the birds coast back to earth. They collapse from grace [when in the air] into earth bound stumbling.
They gather in the marsh “grazing, beating their wings, trumpeting . . . More birds land by the minute, the air red with calls”. For some time “their massed calls carry on the emptying air. The birds flap and fidget, edgy with migration”. Eventually, “the sandhills settle down into wary, stilt-legged sleep, most standing in the water, a few up in the” marsh.
As I was on my way ouyt of Crex when it was almost dark, I drove past a small pond with cranes packed shoulder-to-shoulder standing silently in water up to their knees. A haunting sight.
All quotes from Powers, Richard, The Echo Maker, 2006.
