Sandhill Cranes

Yesterday I attended the planning session at Mosquito Hill Nature Center for the annual Midwest Crane Count.  It was a refresher course for me because I used to do the count every spring.

Two years ago, cataracts caught up with me.  Counters have to be on site at 5:15 a.m. and that meant driving through county roads in the dark, often in rain or fog, racing to get in place before the cranes woke up.  With cataracts, I found driving at night next to impossible, even with advance exploring of the site, even if I went to the same place year after year and knew it well.

The cataracts were removed that spring, and I thought I would be back with the counters in 2010, but no, I injured my knee that winter and was hobbling around with a brace and a cane.

This year, the eyes are fine and the knee tolerable.   On April 16, I'll be at site no. 13 in the Town of Deer Creek, north of New London.  I've never seen that site before though I've been to the Deer Creek natural area to the east.  Prior to this count, I was twice lucky enough to sit in the cold at site 19, a beautiful swamp filled with songs, honking and crane calls.  That is considered the prize spot and is usually taken by the director at Mosquito Hill.

Most often, I was at Carpenter Road near Shiocton, but that site had so many cranes it was getting beyond the capabilities of one solitary counter.  Most of the count is done by identifying unison and guard calls. The guard call is easy, but the important call is the unison call, because the male and female sound it together, and that indicates a mating pair. It is almost a waltz beat, with the male making one noise, immediately followed by a chortled two beat female call.

I had to know by sound the direction and distances of the cranes and what their status was, while marking it all down on a clipboard, with a small flashlight gripped between my teeth.  With regret, I turned that site over to someone else. The new one is supposed to have a smaller population, but it hasn't been counted for years, so we'll see.

The annual count has been done since 1976, begun by a single farmer with an interest in cranes, and has now spread to all the Wisconsin counties and five Midwest states.  It is directed by the International Crane Foundation in Baraboo, Wisconsin, which also has been instrumental in bringing the whooping cranes back from the brink of extinction and is now working with environmentalists in other countries to save other crane species.  

The sandhill cranes and I may be alone in the dark on the morning of April 16, but we are part of a network of concerned citizens, doing our best to preserve these magnificent birds for the next generations.