Sandhills mix it up for annual crane count

By David Horst  sandhill7@gmail.com

I talk to people on occasion – regular readers – who say they would like to come along on one of my outdoor “adventures.”

I like to think I take people along in writing about these opportunities to view nature that come my way, but there’s nothing like experiencing it for yourself. The experience does come with a cost.

For Dick Gosse, the cost was getting up early enough to be in a farm field outside of Hortonville at 5:30 a.m. last Saturday (April 17, 2010).

Gosse is an Outagamie County supervisor, a former Appleton alderman and a very recently retired dentist. More relevant to me, he and his wife, Karen, were the lead donors for the Environmental Stewardship Fund within the Community Foundation for the Fox Valley Region, which I have the pleasure of staffing as part of my day job.

Dick and Karen are devoted environmentalists, from the solar panels on their home to their advocacy for recreation trails.

In short, Dick is the kind of guy you know would enjoy a good sunrise crane show.

We set up behind an old barn near my place, overlooking the field where I have been counting cranes for a number of years. The usual routine is (1) I sip some steaming hot tea while listening to the crane music that marks their rousing in the swamp beyond the woods; (2) cranes emerge in ones or twos or threes and settle in the field; (3) the steady arrival of cranes has me swiveling the spotting scope in wide, sweeping circles to keep track of the arrivals.

We definitely had No. 1. There was a little of No. 2. But No. 3 never really happened.

I can say with great confidence that the explanation is not that the sandhill crane population is in decline. You see them everywhere – even in the remnant farm fields in and around Appleton.

There was a pretty good wind out of the northwest Saturday, and my thought is that kept the cranes in the woods. Another theory bandied around the check-in at Mosquito Hill Nature Center outside New London was that the early spring has the cranes sitting on nests early.

Whatever the cause, the cranes seemed to be on the move that morning. The usual hot spots ran cold.

“The numbers are all over the board,” Jess Miller, a naturalist at Mosquito Hill and the count coordinator for Outagamie County, said. “The cranes seem to have dispersed more into the fields.”

At her spot at the nature center, Miller counted less than half the normal crane visitors. Across the Wolf River, the number was higher than usual.

A good share of our count of nine birds came while they were in the air. We never has more than two on the ground at once, which means we never saw the best part of the crane show.

What we did see was a dozen deer and a flock of 20 turkeys, including two males with their tails spread in full display – like one of those Thanksgiving turkey candles, only with no discernible wick.

Dick had no complaints. He was content to watch turkeys, ponder the history of the rusting farm equipment in the old barn and commiserate with me about the State 15 bypass that will – when, we still don’t know – turn the crane habitat we were monitoring into four lanes of fast-moving traffic.

We build too many highways. We take too much farmland. We don’t treasure history enough. Those were the legislator’s pronouncements for the morning, and his faith in his ability to do something about it will never be shaken.

Next on Dick’s agenda was a grandchild’s birthday party. That’s a pretty blessed Saturday.