The Wonder and Poetry of the Sandhill Cranes

The evening before the first snow back in November, I was in one of the gardens cutting corn straw for an outdoor cat enclosure when I heard the sandhill cranes arriving. I was able to whip my phone out and snap a picture of the first flock I heard and saw this year. 

Maybe it’s because they’re fellow redheads, but I feel a strange kinship with them. Maybe it’s because they’re also known to hang around St. Simon’s Island, where I got married and where I attended my first writers’ conference. They’re not exactly from where I’m from, but how miraculous and harmonious is it that they bore witness to the beginning of my career and my marriage, and now they visit for several months a year? These endangered living fossils travel thousands of miles from Alaska and Northern Canada to Florida and northern Mexico each year. 

I wrote a poem to go with it. It’s in a triangle shape to imitate their formation, and it’s full of B’s and V’s to imitate their trilling. I probably enjoy alliteration and assonance a little too much. I also had fun creating this image on Canva to go with it. 

We aren't far from Muscatatuck Wildlife Refuge, and while the beautiful birds don't settle in the fields right beside us, we enjoy their music until nearly March. They gather in large flocks in some of the more watery fields nearby, and if you drive around a bend at just the right time, you can see all the tones of brown and gray in their wings as they take flight. A couple years ago when I first had this experience, I wrote this:

In the field, the concrete statues were as tall as I am. And then they moved. Their wings sprayed in a gradient, cream to balsa wood to silver. They took off from legs like desert reeds. I had seen photographers adjusting lenses from the edges of Indiana fields, trying to catch the sandhill cranes. And here they were.

The sandhill cranes have inspired a lot of poetry. The Sand-Hill Crane Poem by Mary Austin is a rhyming poem with a refrain. It features other wetland creatures that the cranes hunt as prey. Gillian Nevers wrote a breathtaking poem in protest of hunting the cranes, which influenced Wisconsin policy decisions. 

I've been looking into doing more grant writing for wildlife refuges and I've been much more interested in ecology and animals in general over the last couple of years, after reading more popular science books that cultivate my sense of wonder, like Immense World by Ed Yong and Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer.

The cranes have fascinated me for a while, though. They're tall, often four of five feet, despite weighing no more than 11 pounds. They're some of the oldest creatures on the continent - their fossils have been dated at 2.5 million years old. 

On February 1st, 2025, here in southern Indiana, Muscatatuck Wildlife Refuge is hosting a Celebration of Cranes event. I’m hoping the snow melts by then so we can attend!