Before they head south for the winter, sandhill cranes like to get together and fatten up. One of the places they do this is near the town of Jackson, Michigan. So on a recent visit to Ann Arbor, my dad and I drove over one day to look for them. They weren’t hard to find; they spend a lot of the fall poking around for food in the harvested fields during the day; then, a little before sunset, they start arriving at the Phyllis Haehnle Memorial Sanctuary.
My main conclusion from this experience is that a sandhill crane is a lot of bird. They are BIG, more than three feet tall, and noisy. When the groups are flying in for the evening, you can hear them coming before they appear over the trees. And there are a lot of them – we figured we saw a couple hundred fly in, right over head, and settle in the marsh to yell at each other and, I suppose, to sleep.
Photo: Helen Fields