You can hear sandhill cranes long before you see them. The migrating flocks fly high–a thousand feet or more. In fact, cranes have been seen flying as high as 13,000 feet. Standing at the south edge of the prairie at Miami Woods, I was watching a red-tailed hawk soaring over the open ground when I heard the distant tone. The books all talk of trumpeting calls, but I think the sound is more like that of a French horn. A French horn with a mute stuffed in its bell. But that describes only the quality of the tone. For the volume, imagine that somebody bought the sound system formerly used by the Grateful Dead and is now amplifying the French horn with all that wattage. Cranes are loud.
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The story of cranes in North America has been generally sad for the past century or so. Both of the native species suffered drastic declines in population. Whooping cranes used to live in the Chicago area, but they were gone very early in our history. Sandhill cranes lingered a bit longer, but they were still quite scarce. For almost a century even migrants were rarely seen. Birds of the Chicago Region by Edward R. Ford, published by the Chicago Academy of Sciences in 1956, records sightings of fewer than 20 birds as if these were notable events. In 1956 the traditional staging area of migrants at the Jasper-Pulaski fish and game area in Indiana harbored flocks as large as 600 birds in early spring.
The account of sandhill cranes published in 1926 in Arthur Cleveland Bent’s Life Histories of North American Birds has a distinctly elegiac tone. “The advances of civilization, the drainage of swamps and the cultivation of prairies have doubtless driven this wary, old prairie scout away from all the central portions of the United States; and they are still driving it farther west and north into the unsettled wilderness; the wilderness is fast disappearing and with it will go the cranes and many other interesting forms of wildlife.”
Sandhill cranes apparently mate for life, and they strengthen their bonds with elaborate leaping dances accompanied by very loud calls. At the International Crane Foundation near Baraboo, Wisconsin, keepers have learned to imitate these dances well enough to make female cranes in captive flocks receptive to artificial insemination.
Now we have resident flocks of Canada geese doing their bit for the environment by messing up golf courses. The call of the wild goose has lost its seasonal significance. Instead of telling us that spring is coming, it just tells us that we have left our windows open.
