Cranes' comeback thrills senses

LANSING -- The sandhill crane -- "wildness incarnate," in the words of Aldo Leopold -- is again crowning Iowa wetlands with a mystical charm that had been missing most of the past century.

Since 1992, when the first modern crane nesting was documented in Iowa, sandhills have been resettling Iowa marshes.

"They're on a pretty good run. We're estimating at least 20 breeding pairs here this year," said Pat Schlarbaum, a DNR wildlife diversity biologist who has been tracking the cranes' return to Iowa.

When Leopold wrote his revered "Sand County Almanac" in the early 1940s, sandhills had been largely driven from his beloved central Wisconsin -- and much of the rest of the Upper Midwest, including Iowa -- by indiscriminate hunting, egg collectors and the draining of marshes.

By the mid-20th century the greater sandhill subspecies, of which the Iowa birds are members, had dwindled to just a few dozen pairs in Wisconsin, Michigan and Minnesota.

Legal protections and the reclamation of wetlands eventually encouraged the recovery, with cranes reared in Wisconsin beginning to resettle Iowa marshes in the early 1990s.

The greater subspecies -- as distinct from the lesser subspecies, which congregates in the hundreds of thousands each spring along the Platte River in Nebraska -- now numbers about 10,000.

Schlarbaum said sandhills have reproduced in 22 Iowa counties since 1992, when the first successful Iowa nesting in 98 years was recorded in Tama County's Otter Creek Wildlife Area.

Cranes, which have been observed in more than 50 Iowa counties, have been thrilling wildlife enthusiasts with autumn concentrations at Otter Creek, Sweet's Marsh in Bremer County and along the Mississippi River.

The prehistoric cranes have changed little in the past 6 million years.

Unlike great blue herons, which coil their necks against their breasts in flight, cranes fly with both neck and legs fully extended, hurtling through the sky like feathered spears with a grace that belies their ungainly appearance on land.

They are renowned for their elaborate mating ritual that includes balletic leaps, wing flappings and a complex "unison call" in which the male's single note alternates with his mate's two-note call.

Marsh frequenters say no sound in nature thrills the senses like the bugling of a multitude of migrating cranes.

"That's some sound. It's like, 'Wow!' That's sacred. It's not to be taken lightly," said Jon Stravers of McGregor, a bird researcher with Audubon's Mississippi River Initiative.