Noisy neighbors

Yesterday, late morning, I worked up enough energy to again clean up after our two dogs. I started along the road ditch on the south  side of the drive. My view and attention were focused downward, so I was startled by cacophonous calling from the hay field across the road. I looked up to discover I was being yelled at, or called?, by a pair of sandhill cranes walking through the field. Naturally, my camera was back in to house, so I just listened for awhile. Aldo Leopold describes crane calls beautifully near the beginning of his Marshland Elegy essay.

sandhill cranes near Baraboo, WI

Photo by J. Harrington

 

"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 disclosing whence it comes."

 

sandhill cranes, Carlos Avery WMA marshes

Photo by J. Harrington

It's been a continuing source of pleasure to watch the local sandhill population grow during the twenty-five or so years that we've lived here. These days, we frequently but irregularly see cranes in farm and hay fields and the marshes in and around Carlos Avery Wildlife Management Area, although rarely in the numbers that  we saw. mixed with Canada geese when  we visited the Aldo Leopold Foundation late one summer, as the cranes were gathering for for autumn migration (top picture). They've visited several of the nearby fields, but I've yet to see any in our fields behind the house. That leaves something else I can continue to look forward to.

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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