Last week I heard there were more than 100 sandhill cranes (Antigone canadensis) at the Volant Strip Grasslands (plus short-eared owls) so on Sunday morning, 12 January, Debbie Kalbfleisch and I drove up to Lawrence County.
On Rt 19 just north of Jackson School Road I could see them from the passenger window. From Black Road we had the same view as Glenn Koppel’s photo taken later that same day. Woo hoo! 116!
I was glad there was snow on the ground because these tall gray birds show up easily against white but can be hard to see in brown vegetation.
Sandhill cranes partially hidden in brown vegetation (photo by Chuck Tague)
Fifteen years ago there was no snow when I went to up north find them, again in Lawrence County. I thought I’d never see them and then …
Find out what happened in this 2009 vintage article, including an elusive plastic bag snowy owl.
In 2011 crane watchers in Homer, Alaska noticed that a single Canada goose was convinced he was a sandhill crane. How did this happen? And can it be undone?
As described by Encyclopedia Britannica, imprinting is a form of learning in which a very young animal fixes its attention on the first object it sees, hears, or is touched by and thereafter follows that object.
Imprinting is especially important for nidifugous birds — species that walk away from the nest shortly after hatching — because they must immediately follow their mother in order to survive. They imprint by sight and the lesson lasts a lifetime. If the first thing they see is their mother or another member of their own species, life is good. If not, they grow up believing they are another species and will never find a mate.
Imprinting happens at different times for different species so wildlife centers use surrogacy techniques, described here at the Wildlife Center of Virginia, to insure that baby birds don’t imprint on humans. If they do they cannot be released in the wild.
Human imprinting is well known among cranes so caregivers in the Whooping Crane Recovery Program dress in crane costumes when in sight of the young birds.
Birds use filial imprinting but there are other forms. Studies have shown that we humans prefer the first computer software we use and then compare all new software to that first and favorite app. It’s a form of imprinting called Baby Duck Syndrome. “I don’t like this; it doesn’t work like Microsoft Word.” Quack! Quack!
As for the Canada goose in the video, observers speculated that the bird’s mother laid his egg in sandhill crane nest. When he hatched he saw a sandhill crane and imprinted on the wrong species. He’s the victim of an imprinting error.
(video by Nina Faust on YouTube. photos from Wikimedia Commons; click on the captions to see the original)
When I saw forty sandhill cranes near Volant, Pennsylvania on Monday, I thought of the time I saw 500,000 in Nebraska in March 2004. Half a million sandhill cranes are a breathtaking, exhilarating, stupendous experience! It has to be seen in person. Here’s what it’s like.
Every spring the cranes leave their wintering grounds in Mexico and Texas to converge on an 80-mile stretch of the Platte River in Nebraska. Their numbers peak in March when 80% of all the sandhill cranes on Earth are there.
Cranes are drawn to this location because the Platte is still “a mile wide and an inch deep” between Lexington and Grand Island. The water is shallow enough to roost in overnight and there’s abundant plant food in local wetlands and waste corn in the cattle fields(*). The cranes spend three to four weeks fattening up for their 3,000 mile journey to their breeding grounds in Canada, Alaska and Siberia.
At dusk and dawn they move to and from the Platte River in spectacular numbers. Their sight and sound is amazing, especially when you’re in a bird blind near the action. They dance with their mates and jump for joy.
I saw their great migration in late March 2004. Before my trip I booked dusk and dawn visits to the bird blinds at the Platte, then I flew to Omaha and drove west to Grand Island and Kearny (pronounced Karney). I didn’t mind the 2.5 hour drive because I wanted to see a piece of the Great Plains and experience this: For over 100 miles there are no cranes at all then suddenly, just as I-80 approaches the Platte River, the sky is filled with them. I’d arrived!
I saw hundreds of thousands of sandhill cranes at dusk and dawn and spent my days at local birding hotspots where my highlights were white pelicans, burrowing owls, lapland longspurs, and a Harris’ sparrow. I had hoped to see a whooping crane but I was too early that year. (Whoopers leave Texas later than the sandhills.)
Nothing can beat the sandhill cranes’ migration in Nebraska in March! Don’t miss it!
For information on seeing the cranes’ migration visit Nebraska Flyway‘s website with links to Sandhill Viewing, lodging and food, brochures and maps.
(photo credits: cranes at the Platte from Wikimedia Commons, map of crane migration linked from Visit Grand Island, click on the captions to see the originals. YouTube video by The Chicago Tribune)
(*) There’s a connection between beef and cranes: Half a million sandhill cranes get enough to eat in Nebraska because there’s leftover corn in the cattle fields. There are more cattle than humans in Nebraska.
Common cranes, Grus grus (photo from Wikimedia Commons)
In my ongoing exploration of the Birds of Europe I encountered a crane that resembles our sandhills.
Eurasian or common cranes — often called just “cranes” — are native to Europe, Asia and Africa. Their scientific name Grus grus indicates they were the first crane named by Linnaeus. He would have seen them in summer in his homeland, Sweden, but couldn’t know about sandhill cranes (Grus canadensis) until Europeans sent him specimens from the Americas.
The Eurasian crane is taller than a sandhill with black and white on his neck and face. The closeups below provide a good comparison, first the Eurasian crane, then the sandhill.
Closeup of Eurasian crane (photo from Wikimedia Commons)
Sandhill crane (photo from Wikimedia Commons)
Do these two species ever meet? Maybe.
Eurasian cranes breed across Europe to northern Russia and Asia, as shown below.
German range map of the Eurasian crane (map from Wikimedia Commons)
Though this photo could have been taken in Wisconsin it’s actually from Crawford County, Pennsylvania where a few sandhill cranes hang out near Miller’s Pond.
Sandhills breed in northwestern Pennsylvania so right now they’re calling and courting. Here’s what a pair of cranes sounds like. Not exactly melodic, but they put a lot of spirit into it.
Sandhill cranes are much more common out west but the eastern population has grown to 60,000 birds. They used to be rare in Pennsylvania where our first crane was noted in the late 1980’s, first breeding was recorded in 1993 in Lawrence County, and the first photograph of a nest was in 2009. Sandhills have now been spotted in more 30 Pennsylvania counties — nearly half the state!
This is your opportunity to make history. Put your name, location, count, date and time on record. It’s significant if you visit a likely crane place and don’t find any. Yes, even ZERO counts.
Where to count: Look for cranes in wetlands and nearby agricultural settings. Cranes often forage in shallows and mud flats along lakes, ponds, and swamps or in nearby agricultural fields and pastures, but they can be found in a variety of odd sites during migration. (Pittsburgh birders: visit Lawrence, Mercer, Crawford counties)
When: Sunday, October 27 through Saturday, November 2. Ideal dates are October 29-31. Counts are best conducted just after sunrise or just before sunset when birds are concentrated in their roost sites. (It’s easier to find cranes at that time of day, anyway.)
Now that you know how to recognize cranes (see the crane quiz), here’s a Game Commission video about the sandhill crane population in Pennsylvania with some really cute footage of a baby crane being banded.
When people see a bird that impresses them they often tell me about it. Sometimes they say, “I saw a crane” and I wonder… was it a crane or something else? So I’ve made this conundrum into a quiz.
Which of these are cranes? All of them? Some of them? Only one of them? And which one is non-native?
(The answers are in the comments.)
#1:
#2
#3
#4
(photos #1, #2 and #3 by Steve Gosser, photo #4 from Wikimedia Commons)
p.s. As usual I’ll wait to release comments from moderation so that early responders don’t give away the answer.
