Imagine giant prehistoric birds with six-foot wingspans sailing over Ann Arbor. Or step outside during the sandhill cranes’ fall migration and actually see them. Juliet Berger, the Ann Arbor city ornithologist, reports that last year’s Audubon Society Christmas Bird Count found more than 2,000 sandhills within an eight-mile radius centered in Ann Arbor.
Fossil records tell us that these cranes have been around for more than two million years. By the early 1940s, though, there were very few of them left in the Lower Peninsula–feather hunters and shrinking natural habitat had taken their toll. But now there are upwards of 20,000 pairs nesting in Michigan–pretty good for a species that mates for life, and whose pairs generally raise only one surviving offspring each year. Berger attributes this success story to the Migratory Bird Treaty Act. Passed in 1918 to regulate the hunting and sale of birds migrating between the U.S. and Canada, it expanded to include Mexico in 1936.
Sandhills are found most often in or near cornfields, foraging on waste grain, although they eat a variety of other plants and small animals. Our images of birds on the ground were taken in the lots across the street from our house. The image with the green grass in the background, taken in October, shows a migrating bird going south; the other image was taken in March, during spring migration. Our flight shot is from Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge in New Mexico, a large sandhill crane sanctuary where the government plants corn for the cranes.
Cranes have inspired artists and dancers–their mating dances are famous–and have enriched the cultures of many peoples from Asia to the Americas. One Native American legend explains why this gray-feathered bird is so often seen with its feathers stained a reddish brown: a crane too young to migrate was forced to spend the winter stirring Cold’s fire with its bill, which burned its feathers red. For those who prefer a more prosaic explanation, the staining is caused by the cranes rubbing mud and vegetation over themselves while preening. (The staining occurs only where they have access to materials that include iron-rich reddish-brown pigment.)
An observer may hear sandhills before seeing them. Their flight call is very loud–we heard it while writing this column in our home office. Described by one field guide as a “trumpetlike garoo-oo a-a-a-a,” it can carry for more than a mile.
Cranes are common at Kensington Metropark–Berger says that a pair have overwintered there. (The others no doubt migrated to Florida.) And the Audubon’s Haehnle Sanctuary near Jackson is famous for the sandhills that migrate through there starting around this month. If you go to Haehnle, bring a pair of binoculars: our experience is that the birds fly high and land a great distance away. Or join the Waterloo Natural History Association’s Sandhill Crane Tour on October 23 (See Events), which offers an opportunity to see “large flocks of these magnificent birds at close range” at Portage Lake before proceeding on to Haehnle.
