Out on Whitefish Point

I was in Michigan to speak at Whitefish Point Bird Observatory's annual Spring Fling at the end of April. These are hardy people, with a different way of defining "spring" than we have down here in subtropical Ohio. They go by the calendar, not by the weather, and if the calendar says it's spring, well then it is. They go out.

I love nautical disaster art. I find myself wondering what it might be like to look at a beautiful work of art, having lived through a disaster. Hey, it wasn't teal blue out there. It was PITCH BLACK and you couldn't see your hand in front of your face. But that's a really nice painting.


Whitefish Point is famous as the place where the Edmund Fitzgerald went down, taking 29 souls with it. This billboard is for my friend Grady, who loves shipwrecks most of all. Well, at least he did when I saw him last. He may have moved on to trainwrecks by now.



Among birders, Whitefish Point is famous for being a fabulous migrant trap, welcoming tired birds who've winged across Superior in the fall, and stacking up apprehensive birds (especially raptors) who don't much feel like facing the crossing in spring. Either way, it works real well for birdwatchers. I spent a fun afternoon watching hawks on the WPBO platform. A goshawk made my day!



Sandhill cranes breed sparingly here. I was lucky to spot a couple of pairs, prospecting for nest sites.

But it's the pines along the shore that hold the big treasure for birders.



I had to keep reminding myself that I was not on a beach in Cape Cod, so similar was the vegetation.


There's something disorienting about not having the tang of salt and fish in your nostrils when you're walking on dune vegetation.

Looking out at Superior, I got a graphic demonstration of how shifting lake ice can plow up gravel and make landforms. It was like seeing a glacier in miniature. Here, a tiny moraine.
When glaciers plowed along the land, they picked up ridges of gravel and sand. At their terminus, they piled up these deposits as they melted. The same thing's happening here, on a miniature scale, and seasonally.



The beach rocks were so beautiful that I dared not start to look for a favorite. Even so, my
pockets were heavy when I left. The more closely I looked, the more beautiful the stones became. I couldn't get over the mix of blue, pink, flecked granite, and terra cotta. Phoo. Imagine having that in your landscaping, or your aquarium! Pebble lust.

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My friend, festival organizer Bob Pettit, told me of seeing people staggering out with bagsful of the lovely water-worn stones, even though they're not supposed to.




You get the feeling that people have been here for a very long time, and in the cool temperatures and acid conditions, their traces linger. Here's a Model A fender, the same kind I used to sit on as a child, clinging to the headlight strut, as my friend Billy Jones drove us around the neighborhood in the evening. I wondered if there might be an entire Model A in that hummock under the birches.

I was soon to find out that the dune forest hid even greater riches.

Crane Confrontation

Watching the sandhill cranes at Bosque del Apache NWR is an education in itself. They travel in family groups, often two adults with their two kids from the year, and they talk constantly, gutteral, resonant purrs from the adults, and tweedling chirps from the juveniles. Seeing them pal around must be hard for a solitary great blue heron. I watched in amazement (and remembered to shoot pictures) as a lone heron flew over to join a small family group of greater sandhill cranes. What could he have been thinking?He's in their personal space. The cranes dawdle over closer to him. How touching. Or not. I had a pretty good hunch that the cranes would send the heron packing, and sure enough, when they got closer, they raised their stately necks and inclined their bills, giving a clear cross-species threat to the heron.
You can see that the heron is already gathering its neck in for takeoff. Wise move.

Cranes, by the way, fly with necks extended, and that's a quick and easy way to tell them from herons in flight. Cranes also lack a functional hallux, or hind toe, so they can't land in a tree like a heron can. They are open country birds, who can't perch but must stand on solid ground or in shallow water. This impacts their habitat preferences and natural history in lots of ways. (Thanks to Paul Tebbel for some thought-provoking conversation on cranes while we drove around in his truck).There are two species of sandhill crane at Bosque del Apache, the greater and lesser sandhill cranes. Lesser sandhills are much smaller than greaters (the bird in the middle with brown wings is a lesser sandhill). They also tend to "paint" their wings more heavily with iron oxide, so they really stand out in a crowd. Yes: cranes decorate their feathers by painting them with red-staining mud. That's why you'll only see the stain on the parts of their bodies they can reach.
Cranes on green, a lovely sight. The second bird from the left is probably a lesser sandhill crane. In the photo below, the brown-winged lesser sandhills are easy to pick out, markedly smaller than the pale greaters. How I miss their resonant calls. Cranes are addictive.

It was a snowy day here; the kids were home from school, and so was Bill. What a nice feeling, to have us all together in a warm house. Kids played outside much of the day. Bill built them a mogul right before dark and they caught some sweet air going over it in the toboggan. Baker frisked around for about ten minutes at a time and then came in all shivery and grunty, wanting to be wrapped in a down comforter. I got some cute pictures of him googling along in the snow. All in all, we got about 8", and there are high hats on all the bluebird houses. I shoveled out the cardinals before dark, and left some corn for the deer out under the pines. Did two watercolors, diverting myself between washes with an excellent and thought-provoking discussion of sandhill crane hunting. You guys are the bomb. Thoughts were firing back and forth in private e-mails, too, about aesthetics and hunting and whether we have the right to hunt cranes. Nobody hunts flamingoes. What if sandhill cranes were lucky enough to be pink?

Time to fix dinner--a chicken, but not a prairie chicken. Life is full of ironies. Stay warm.

The Wariest of Birds

Small technical detail: I'm suddenly being spammed at the rate of 100 messages every ten minutes, comments on archived blog posts, from "Anonymous." I've been forced to disallow anonymous comments on my blog, or risk losing email function. You will need to have a Google account to comment now. It's easy to sign up. If you're accustomed to commenting as Anonymous, just think up a random name for yourself, click "Other," and you should be good to go.A rare close flyover. There's nothing quite like hearing the crane's sonorous purr right overhead, along with the rush of its huge slaty pinions. If you've never heard that call, please go to Susan's blog, where she has a wonderful video, with sound, of a huge crane flyover.

See the coyote, third from the left?

The kids and I were watching a bunch of cranes out in a field when I noticed that their necks were unnaturally straight, and they had ceased feeding. "I'll bet there's a coyote around, kids!" And sure enough, a few pans of the scope revealed a pair of pointed ears in a patch of brush.

The coyotes were eating a carcass out in the field, and they really didn't pose much threat to the cranes, as long as the birds were aware of them. It's hard to sneak past a sandhill crane.

The kids were enthralled to watch a predator/prey interaction. Liam especially glued himself to the scope and fretted while Phoebe took a turn. "She's hogging it! She's had it for a hundred thousand million minutes!" We had the best time out on the refuge together. Once they settled into the slow but punctuated pace of nature watching, they were happy to while away the hours, peeking through the scope, playing with rocks and sticks and water while I looked for the next cool bird or animal to watch.The cranes walk along the roads atop the dikes at Bosque, and they often seem to stand vehicles down, in no hurry to clear the way. It's so good to see them rule the place, when they're hunted for sport all along their flyway. Yes. Sandhill cranes are shot for sport (and occasionally for food) in every state they migrate through. There are seasons and bag limits on sandhill cranes all along their migratory route. If you don't believe me, just Google "Sandhill crane hunt." If you're sensitive, don't. Most birders, who will travel hundreds of miles to watch their migration gatherings, don't know that these "ancient birds" that they admire so much are targets for hunters, and are as shocked as I was to learn it. I think they need to know it, and I often bring it up when I'm among crane fans, even though it doesn't do much for my popularity. Talking about crane hunting in such circles has roughly the same effect as cutting a giant fart at a cocktail party.
I've got an article mostly written about it, but I'm pretty sure the usual outlets for my stuff won't be interested. Maybe it's one for the next book. The thought of bringing these long-lived, monogamous, family-oriented and highly intelligent birds down for sport or roasting makes me physically ill. But then a lot of what's done in the name of sport hunting makes me ill. I know I'm getting crankier as I get older, and more conservative about speaking out because it might just be crankiness at work. But there's something about sport hunting of sandhill cranes that strikes me as fundamentally, indefensibly, sickeningly wrong.It's clear to me, if not to most state game and fish departments, that a sandhill crane is worth infinitely more alive than dead. (The same could be said of vanishing prairie chickens and sage grouse, both greatly admired by birders, hard as heck to find, and inexplicably, still hunted.)
Just go to the Platte River in Nebraska in March if you don't think so. Crowd into a blind with dozens of other paying customers, and hear their awe and stunned gasps at the beauty of the flocks sleeping and rising off the river at dawn. Here, a trio flies past the visitor center at Bosque, past people who are paying just to admire them, and let them go on their way.

It does explain why sandhill cranes almost never allow a person within gunshot range; why they are the wariest of birds. Imagine how wonderful crane watching could be if they could relax around us, the way we relax around them.
Can we find it in our hearts to just let them be?