November storms bring birds, and as a rule of thumb, the bigger the storm the better the birds. This year we marked the anniversary of the sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald with a storm as violent as the one that sent that ship to the bottom of Lake Superior.
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The whooping crane seen and photographed at Illinois Beach State Park around noon on Wednesday, November 12, may be facing that problem. Or it may get lucky. It was flying with a huge flock–estimated at 3,000 birds–of sandhill cranes. The sandhills have a well-established migratory route that takes them around the southwestern corner of Lake Michigan to a feeding and resting spot at the Jasper-Pulaski fish and game area in northwestern Indiana.
Whooping cranes may once have nested in Illinois. Accounts from the late 19th century say they did, but evidence in the form of eggs or specimens is rare. Certainly they were migrants through this region. They have been hovering on the brink of extinction for many years and became famous as an endangered species before there was an Endangered Species Act. The only breeding flock spends the summer in northern Alberta and winters at the Aransas National Wildlife Refuge on the Texas coast. Their normal migration route would be through the Dakotas, Nebraska, and Kansas, so this bird was presumably blown east by the strong winds.
The winds brought us the large and rare species. They also brought us abundance, a natural quality that is hard to find these days. That flock of 3,000 sandhill cranes at Illinois Beach State Park was only one of the large groups observed on the Wednesday following the storm. Two thousand cranes passed over the Botanic Garden, and more than 200 flew over Rosehill Cemetery. At the Northwestern University landfill, between 6:30 and 10 AM, nearly 900 snow geese and more than 1,000 shovelers passed by. Shovelers are ducks with long, broad beaks that they use to strain food from the water. Their nesting range is concentrated in the prairie pothole region northwest of here. We always see them in spring and fall, but we don’t expect to see 1,000 at a time.
Imagine launching yourself into that storm. We were all huddled in our houses, checking our supply of flashlight batteries and wondering if the food in the freezer would thaw before Com Ed got the power back on. Only the largest of human aircraft can dare the skies when the winds are gusting to 60 miles an hour. But a Lapland longspur, which weighs about an ounce, can use the energy of the storm to carry it hundreds of miles.
