Crane count offers a seat for music of the morning

May 3, 2008

I went to a symphony a couple weeks ago.

They play daily in the warmer months, but the truth is there’s only one day a year that I really listen to the full performance. That’s the day of the annual crane count – April 19 this year.

Organized across the Midwest by the International Crane Foundation in Baraboo, the crane count is an exercise in citizen science. Biological laymen like myself get to help chronicle the comeback of the sandhill crane, this huge and amazing red-capped bird.

Beyond that, it is reason and license to spend sunrise doing nothing but listening and observing. It is an invitation to witness the music of morning.

Audience members are to be in position by 5:30 a.m. That’s not a challenge for me because my reserved seat is in a counting area in a farm field across the road from our home.

A combination of the lingering dark, the morning mist and the protection of the woods makes the start an experience for the ears more than for the eyes.

At 5:38 a.m., the orchestra begins to tune. The concertmaster bugles from offstage. His raucous, booming staccato is the alarm call of the first crane to proclaim the morning.

Within minutes, the rest of the orchestra joins in, creating a rising cacophony of musicians preparing their instruments. None is yet to be seen. The greatest of all houselights are still dimmed.

The sections of the orchestra – all horn players, distributed across the marshy woods – compete with their individual runs up the scale.

This discordant brass section must share the stage before long. The wild tom turkey adds a counterpoint to the melody with his curt “gobble, gobble, gobble.” The cock pheasant provides the percussion. The great horned owl insists on a mournful solo.

At 5:52 a.m., the mellower French horns (French Canadian that is) broaden the range with a quick arpeggio from a small flock of passing geese, accented by the gentle snare of wind on duck flight feathers.

As the clock ticks past 5:58, there’s a pause. While this orchestra is well rehearsed, it begins and ends movements at its own whim, independent of any score.

Six o’clock and the invisible crane chorus builds to a crescendo, each straining to out-perform the musician next to him. The pheasant adds a raspy rhythm and the performers begin to come out from hiding.

At 6:11 a.m. I record one crane walking and two flying over. Four minutes later, two more cranes fly by and a blast pierces the air. Not the wakeup point in the Nutcracker Suite, but an attempt at dinner by a turkey hunter camouflaged out in the field.

I did not have a solo seat to the morning performance after all.

As the sun lights the scene, the auditory treat turns to a visual one. At 6:22 I see two sandhills walking and feeding and count one group of 15 turkeys and another of 12 – with the hunter hidden in between.

The cranes’ numbers slowly grow as more and more emerge from the woods for the post-performance brunch. From time to time they reprise their song to greet a late arrival.

Scanning the field with a spotting scope confirms seven, then 10, then 16 cranes taking part in the feed.

At 7:10 a.m. something spooks them. I am frantically counting cranes as 26 birds rise up out of the farm field to take their final bow and fly from the stage.

Time for me to pack up and leave this outdoor concert hall and file my review with the International Crane Foundation. There’s no place for it on the counting form, but my evaluation is one word: Bravo.

Owl release is Abe's day at dad's work

By David Horst  sandhill7@gmail.com

SEYMOUR – My dad is a retired operating engineer – crane operator in more common language – so when I got to go to work with him, it was quite an adventure. 

This was well before the structured “Take Your Daughter or Son to Work Day” existed. I suspect now that it was more mom’s “Get Davie Out of My Hair Day.” Her job was taking care of the house and family so every day was a take-me-to-work day for her.

Going with dad to change oil on a Saturday meant a day of climbing on the gravel pile, pulling the levers on big cranes and unpacking your sandwich in the work site shanty like the big guys. In short, it was the kind of day when good memories are built.

Warden Mike Young and son Abe.

Abe Young had one of those days last weekend. His dad is Mike Young, a warden with the state Department of Natural Resources. 

I’m sure there are plenty of days when there are said to Young that a 5-year-old shouldn’t hear, but this was different. On this day, Abe and his dad were going to release an owl.

Abe had also been along the day Young responded to a report of an injured great-horned owl in a residential neighborhood in Seymour. That was in mid-December.

The owl had suffered a head trauma, possibly from flying into a window or a structure. She had convalesced at The Feather Rehabilitation Center near New London and was ready to be released into the wild in the same Seymour neighborhood.

As Young and Pat Fisher of The Feather affixed an identification tag to the owl’s leg, Abe alternated between peering back at its wide eyes and sliding on a patch of ice on the driveway where we were parked.

Young held the owl firmly at the tops of its legs preparing for the release. The bird flapped its great wings, making Abe go wide-eyed.

Walking to the edge of the drive, Young pointed the owl in the direction of a nearby woods and tossed her skyward. The owl dipped down and then silently caught the air in her wide wingspan, lifting a dozen or so feet above the ground. 

Despite the hint Young had given her, the owl flew not toward the woodlot, but into the front yard, where she disappeared into the branches of a spruce tree. 

In a dank, artificially lit bureaucratic DNR office in Madison, a biologist might have viewed her as just an individual, an injured member of a species that isn’t endangered or even threatened.

Out here in the brisk, waning light of day, she is an individual, with value all her own.
Fisher doesn’t recognize the word “just” when it comes to injured birds. “It’s another living thing. I’m not into numbers,” she said.

Abe went all shyboy on me when I asked him what he would tell his friends in school about releasing the owl. He did confide that letting the owl go was even more fun than sliding on the ice.

His curiosity took over after I left. He asked his dad where the horns are on the great-horned owl. Dad explained it’s named for feathers on its head that look like horns.

“Why did it fly away from us daddy?” Abe wanted to know. Owls may be renowned for their night vision, but they can’t recognize the innocence in the face of a 5-year-old.

Young said Abe went to kindergarten the next day showing pictures and talking about the owl. I’m sure he’ll still talk about it when he tops 50 and reflects back on good memories built by going to work with dad.

At the wolf's door

By David Horst  sandhill7@gmail.com

Twenty-two people ride a darkened school bus down back country roads in search of what all of their childhood fairy tales warned them against. 

Up front is Cindy Mueller, a naturalist at High Cliff State Park and various other area nature centers. The evening's activity is a typical fall Saturday night for Mueller. She's a wolf howler.

Normally a more solitary activity, Mueller has agreed to take a group from the Northeastern Wisconsin Audubon Society to her assigned howling grounds. She had to clear it with the top biologists in the state wolf recovery effort.

We have agreed to a series of strict rules, including wearing no fragrance, exiting the bus in total silence, no coughing or throat clearing, and should you be inclined otherwise, no urinating outside of the bus.

We also agreed not to disclose where we were, so it must suffice to say we were within a three-hour drive of the Fox Cities.

The plan is to make several stops, where we are to climb down from the bus by the light of the moon and stand silently as Mueller lets loose with her well-practiced wolf howls. At an orientation at Fallen Timbers Environmental Center near Black Creek, she offered no guarantee that we would hear wolves, and all but assured we would not see them.

Puppy power fuels aerobics

By David Horst  sandhill7@gmail.com

We’ve discovered a new form of aerobic exercise that may leave even the spinners and the kick-boxers winded.

All it requires are a snow-covered trail, a pair of snowshoes and a 1-year-old yellow Lab.

We had one of the latter come into our lives a couple of months ago. Houdini is a shelter dog – a stray no one claimed. And he is a runner.

There is nothing in the world Houdini loves more than flat out running. Calling his name, commanding him to come, waving cocktail wieners in the air – none of it distracts him from running.

Should he manage to slip his collar – and he has – his first instinct is to head for the horizon. Unlike every other dog we’ve owned, we can’t walk him off-leash on the trails up on our little sand hill. He requires a harness and a leash, every time.

That’s become problematic in this winter so bent on toppling the snowfall record. When the snow got deep enough, we needed snowshoes to break trail. That meant walking on snowshoes while tethered to a ball of puppy energy.

Little owl is welcome barn guest

By David Horst  sandhill7@gmail.com

Put up a barn in the middle of an oak woods and you never know what might drop in.

We’ve had snakes and rabbits, swallows and phoebes, and one lone grouse on a stormy night.

Most recently, one of Wisconsin’s littlest owls paid a visit up on the sand hill we call home.