The horns of Spring

When, yesterday, we began listing the Sounds of (early) Spring, we committed a mortal sin of omission. From the quotation below, taken from Aldo Leopold's A Sand County Almanac, see if you can determine who we left out:

High horns, low horns, silence, and finally a pandemonium of trumpets, rattles, croaks , and cries that almost shakes the bog with its nearness, but without yet disclosing whence it comes. At last a glint of sun reveals the approach of a great echelon of birds. On motionless wing they emerge from the lifting mists, sweep a final arc of sky, and settle in clangorous descending spirals to their feeding grounds....

Yes, you're correct. We omitted sandhill cranes. We are embarrassed and would be more so had we not mentioned them in a slightly different context several weeks ago, on March 1. Today, the Better Half reported having heard cranes as she was returning with her dog, Franco, from their mid-day constitutional. We look forward with high anticipation to both seeing and hearing the returned cranes and are very grateful Leopold's Marshland Elegy remains premature.

sandhill cranes have returned

Photo by J. Harrington

The Sandhills

By Linda Hogan

The language of cranes

we once were told

is the wind. The wind 

is their method,

their current, the translated story 

of life they write across the sky. 

Millions of years

they have blown here

on ancestral longing,

their wings of wide arrival, 

necks long, legs stretched out 

above strands of earth

where they arrive

with the shine of water, 

stories, interminable

language of exchanges 

descended from the sky

and then they stand,

earth made only of crane 

from bank to bank of the river 

as far as you can see

the ancient story made new.

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