The first pale echo of an early spring in Wisconsin tugs my ears to the south toward the winding valley. The dogs pause and turn raised curious noses into the southwest wind with alert ears cocked forward. Vigilant now, they listen and greedily gather new scents as dogs do.
We stand waiting. Watching. Listening. Breathing.
We catch that faint hoarse bugled voice once again. Then a flurry of distinctive, primative rattling calls echo up the frosty valley of the lazy North Branch of the Milwaukee River that cuts north and south meandering between the moraines, eskers and drumlins layed down only ten thousand years ago by the last of the five great ice ages, called the Wisconsinan glaciation period.
I feel a sudden jolt of joy in my heart. Chortling crane song is my favorite exuberant raucous, rambunctious, rollicking anthem of spring.
Our first solitary ancient traveler of the season has found his way home like millions of his kind over the past 2.5 million years, making it the oldest known surviving avian species.
While the earliest, unequivocal fossil of a sandhill crane is at least at the 2.5-million-year marker, the bird may go back as far as ten million years. But even at 2.5 million years of age, sandhill cranes are nearly half again as old as the earliest remains of modern bird species, which date back to the Pliocene/Pleistocene boundary, 1.6 million years ago.
I study the low-hung gray shadow in the distance as it readily grows closer and larger. It's stretched full out with tall gracefull legs and extended long neck. I note that the seven foot wingspan is quicker on the upstroke than the powerful downstroke creating fluid aerodynamic poetry.
I smile as the solitary shadow slips to the right of my shoulder, ignoring us, in the early morning sun light. The frozen February wetland reflects for a moment the sounding whoosh of an ancient wing beat and of sandhill song and is gone as quickly, fading to the north.
Today will remain a very good day in my memory, as my first sandhill of 2012 has arrived three weeks early. We head toward home with the promise of a hot cup of coffee and a warm cinnamon muffin waiting for me and simple brown kibbles for the dogs. I quietly mull the meaning of this day and ponder the crane species that is older than the hills I now walk upon. I reflect on the science of our warming planet and am chilled. As caretakers, we are not the only victims of our own malfeasance.
I will give my dogs an extra hug today.
Fun facts.
Sandhill cranes are on the move in fall and spring when they migrate to and from Florida or Georgia where they spend the winter months. They return to Wisconsin's marshes in March. Cranes select a mate when they are 4-years old and live as many as 25 to 30 years with the same mate. Crane families migrate south together. Young birds that have outgrown their parents, hang out together in groups of 20, called a "bachelor flock." They migrate and feed together at night in open woods and fields away from the marsh.
When sandhill cranes are ready to mate, they begin a unique courtship ritual. The cranes have a series of dances that they do while making calls. The dance looks like two marionette puppets frolicking delicately on strings. They alternately bow and leap into the air with wings stretched out as they circle each other. While they dance, the pair lets out a series of loud calls. The male utters a note followed quickly by the female's two-note answer. Sometimes you can hear them from 2 miles away on quiet spring mornings. After their dance, they build a nest near open water in a grassy area. The nest is made with piles of grasses heaped across 5 feet. Females will lay one or two eggs in the nest and both birds will incubate them. Chicks are born in 30 days and have fuzzy yellow-brown feathers. They're usually born in mid-May in Wisconsin. Birds will renest if they lose the eggs to predators.
In 1949, in a book called
A Sand County Almanac, our Wisconsin biologist and naturalist Aldo Leopold wrote:
Our appreciation of the crane grows with the slow unraveling of earthly history....The other members of the fauna in which he originated are long since entombed within the hills. When we hear his call we hear no mere bird. We hear the trumpet in the orchestra of evolution.... Their annual return is the ticking of the geologic clock. Upon the place of their return they confer a peculiar distinction. Amid the endless mediocrity of the commonplace, a crane marsh holds a paleontological patent of nobility, won in the march of aeons.
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