By Jeremy Varner
In early February, my 12U/11U baseball team was working through the first practice of the new season at Medlock Park when I paused practice and directed my team’s attention away from baseball up to the sky for a bit. Later that same week while working an estate sale for my neighbor I had to stop answering pricing questions for a few moments to gaze skyward. Both times it was a loud, noisy flock of sandhills cranes chattering ceaselessly as they made their spring migration northward. Sandhill cranes (Antigone canadensis) are among the early indicators of spring’s return like daffodils and baseball tryouts with ice on the ground.
About now is when I should tell you what the call of sandhill cranes sounds like. But that would require me being good at describing bird calls, which I am not. My best description is that it is similar to when you are dragging a table across the floor and the legs intermittently stick then slide then stick all in rapid succession. The Cornell Lab of Ornithology calls them rattling bugle calls. Do yourself a favor and listen to recordings online. Cornell has lots of recordings on their website AllAboutBirds.com. It’s a great resource.
However, you want to describe the call, one thing everyone agrees with is that it is loud. I almost always hear them before I see them, and they are always a ways up there. A few thousand feet maybe. Higher than that sketchy Doordasher who ate half your fries. And yet you can hear them jabbering away while your feet are firmly planted on the ground.
They are almost always in a big group of about one to three dozen birds and all of them are talking at the same time. They have a long migration, so it makes sense that they spend the time talking. Most sandhill cranes in North America migrate up and down the Great Plains, but one subset winters down in Florida. I’ve never seen a sandhill crane on the ground in Georgia, but I’ve seen them flying southbound while tailgating for Georgia Tech football games and going back north during baseball spring training.
Saying they fly south and north gives the impression they are flying directly towards their destination. In my experience their progress is more like groups of high school students leaving campus, they are generally going towards something, but their path is more ambling or zig-zag than anything else. The spring birds are flying north-ish in general, but could be headed east-northeast, northeast, north, northwest, or west-northwest at any given moment.
By the time you are reading this it’s likely all the birds will have flown over our neighborhoods, but they’ll be back this fall, not to visit, just passing through. But if you hear or see them making their way south this fall, take a minute and admire them. They always sound like they’re having fun.
