Outdoors: Thoughts on a rare visit from a sandhill crane

A rare overwintering sandhill crane - or a thoroughly confused migrant - showed up in my neighborhood in mid February.

The bird was still here the first week of March, raising hopes that it will attract a mate and raise a colt or two this spring.

Buchanan County already has documented sandhill reproduction in a wetland northwest of Independence, but when it comes to the birds ecology pioneer Aldo Leopold described as 'wildness incarnate,” the more the merrier.

For the past few years sandhills, including obvious pairs, have resided during the nesting season on a reclaimed wetland west of the Wapsipinicon River a few miles northeast of Walker.

If they raised any young, however, they did so in secrecy.

Nesting sandhills, gone from Iowa for nearly a century, began reappearing in 1992, when the first successful Iowa nesting in 98 years was recorded in Tama County's Otter Creek Wildlife Area.

As of last year, sandhills had reproduced in 26 Iowa counties and had been sighted in 33 others, according to the Department of Natural Resources.

Though nesting cranes have not yet been documented in Linn County, they have in the adjacent counties of Johnson, Jones, Delaware and Buchanan and in a strip of eight contiguous counties bordering the Mississippi River.

By the mid 1900s, the greater sandhill subspecies, of which the Iowa birds are members, had been largely driven from the Upper Midwest by indiscriminate hunting, egg collectors and the draining of marshes.

Unlike the lesser subspecies, whose members congregate in the hundreds of thousands each spring along the Platte River in Nebraska, the greater sandhill population dwindled to a few dozen pair before the recovery.

They eventually responded to legal protection and the reclamation of wetlands, rebuilding their numbers until cranes reared in Wisconsin began recolonizing their ancestral homes.

With their gangly terrestrial appearance and their graceful, straight-arrow flight, sandhill cranes elevate the status of the state's wildlife, and nothing in Iowa is wilder than their piercing, otherworldly call.