In late November my wife and I witnessed one of nature’s great spectacles: the migratory gathering of sandhill cranes at the Jasper-Pulaski Fish and Wildlife Area near Medaryville, Indiana. Some 20,000 cranes stop at the park en route to wetlands in Georgia and Florida. Almost the entire eastern population passes through the park in the fall. This grand migratory gathering begins in late September and peaks in late November. That’s when you can observe a teeming blue-gray sea of these wading birds spreading over the goose pasture while the sun is declining. For some reason they congregate in this vast open field late each afternoon before going off to roost in the nearby marshes. It would be as though every worker in South Bend met in Howard Park to locate all their neighbors before going home.
Arriving at Jasper-Pulaski just before dusk, we saw small and large cohorts of cranes returning to the park from all directions. They came from feeding grounds miles away, harvested cornfields and some remaining small wetlands. Sandhill cranes are large birds with wingspans up to seven feet. The adults have bald red heads. They fly with their necks and long legs fully extended. Their posture seems formal, but their flight looks leisurely.
Once inside the preserve, we could hear them from far off, an uncanny, unaccountable noise, like distant traffic on a superhighway but shriller. The sandhill crane’s remarkable call is like a cross between a dolphin and a turkey, high-pitched and sharply trilling but guttural.
The fun of sandhill crane watching is seeing them land. They fly over the viewing platform stretched out stiffly at first, until they get about a hundred feet from their landing spot, and then they relax in the air and drift downward. Each landing party seems to be a subgroup of a congregation on the ground and flies obliquely for a little ways as though searching, listening for familiar calls from below. The landing itself is like a parachute jump. At thirty feet up, they lower their legs, raise their heads but hold their wings above like an umbrella from which their upright bodies dangle, and they float to earth and land with a hop or two.
Through a viewing scope provided by the Fish and Wildlife Division, you can watch them walking and hopping around and digging in the dirt with their long, sharp beaks. Some perform short versions of their mating dance, leaping up again and again, their wings outspread and flapping a little—a motion that looks truly jubilant, the kind of dance a novice angel might perform. But with birds it’s hard to distinguish between joy and aggression. These animals are fiercely alive. Together they are a tumultuous mass. There in the great rectangular field before us, they looked like a milling crowd of spectators at an outdoor concert—Woodstock maybe. Or, better yet, they were a gathering of citizens at the people’s mall in Washington, D.C., there, perhaps, as witnesses to the tragic loss of America’s wetlands. Before settlement, Indiana had about 5.5 million acres of wetlands. We’ve lost almost 90% of that.
Fortunately, the numbers of sandhill cranes have been growing since the 1950s, when fewer than 1000 remained and naturalists feared they would vanish from lands east of the Mississippi. So maybe these citizens of earth were celebrating their survival. But at the same time they were surely urging us to continue our efforts on their behalf and, in that voice of nature always all around us and yet so hard to hear, saying to us, “You have everything. All we ask is the right to survive.” Because, if they stood on the mall, where we stood on the viewing tower, we were in the Capitol building or the White House, two places closed to them; and so they had to shout.