It is both easy and challenging to describe what it was like to see migrating sandhill cranes this weekend.
The easy version: we traveled to northwestern Indiana to view the cranes. Once there we looked at them from an observation tower as they landed in a water-soaked field. We drove the county roads, looking for cranes, which we found standing in old corn fields and in farmers' back yards. We returned to the field in the late afternoon, and watched the field grow thick with thousands of birds and watched them flying in above us, gliding then parachuting to the ground.
The challenge comes with how it felt to see these birds, to hear their distinctive cry, a sort of loud purring trill with notes of dove calls and trumpets. For a while it felt like my vocabulary had been reduced to four words: Oh, So, Cool, and Wow, uttered in various combinations and intonations. You would see distant strings of dark gray shapes against the slowly darkening overcast sky, and they would come nearer, calling, and nearer, and then they were in front of you, or flying directly above you. You'd see them as dark shapes between the silhouetted branches of late-fall trees, and then they'd be over you, and you could see the feathers and the feet and the long necks. When they neared the ground, they'd cup their wings and extend their legs down, toes outstretched, neck curved back, and fall into the growing mass of standing birds. They looked like parachutists, or drifting milkweed pods, or floating dandelion seeds, or mosquitos.
Once down, they'd be part of a great milling crowd of tall grey-brown birds, birds the color of driftwood and old silvering barns, with a smear of red on their heads. Sometimes you'd see a younger bird with leftover immature plumage, and it was a soft tan overlaid on the grey. There were 10,000s of them, stretching to the far edge of the water-soaked grass, and disappearing into the gloaming in the distance. Among them was a solitary whooping crane, and she glowed a startling white among her companions as dusk came on. Deer wandered the periphery, occasionally making runs through the standing flocks. From time to time a group of birds would decide to lift off and fly farther out, and their forms gleamed against the dark line of trees on the horizon when they did. As they did so, they were replaced by the hundreds of new arrivals flowing in from the north and nortwest.
And the sound! It was not quite a cacophony - it was neither so loud nor so dissonant as that - but it filled the air with their presence, a rolling mutter of sound that was at once soothing and stimulating. The description in the bird book - garoo-a-a-aaa - was pitifully inadequate; even the recordings I've found online fail to capture how it sounded in the cold overcast air, burbling and rolling and vibrating the air in a way that was deeply satisfying.
It was cold, and raw, and the wind blew, and we did not care. The cranes! The cranes were migrating - and we were there.
Download cranes.wav
(from the Indiana DNR - if you don't want to download it, you can listen to it there)
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