2009
I spent this year’s Midwest Crane
Count observing a rare and threatened species.
Sure, I saw some sandhill cranes,
which is the point of the annual census sponsored by the International Crane
Foundation in Baraboo. But the more rare sighting was a family that values
nature over electronics.
I was joined at my usual crane
counting spot near Hortonville by Terry Broullire and Cheryl Konkol-Broullire,
and their children, 11-year-old Ella and 10-year-old Nathan.
This is a family that spends their
free time on bicycle day trips, hiking in the woods and searching for
salamanders. The kids take summer ecology classes. They camp together – in a
tent.
These are activities I was
beginning to think had gone the way of the barn dance and the rotary phone,
crowded out of existence by social networking, virtual communications and
pretend golfing in front of a TV screen.
The Konkol-Broullires don’t have
any game consoles. They don’t even have – gasp
– the Internet.
It’s not easy raising kids that
way today, said Cheryl, a strings teacher at several Appleton elementary
schools. Terry, an aviation mechanic with Gulfstream, conceded they will have
to give in on the Web ban soon for the sake of school research.
I hadn’t met the family before,
nor many like them. These kids were actually excited about watching the sun
rise over the emerging scrub of a farm field and listening for the prehistoric
trumpet of a bird that’s taller than they are.
I told them they were getting in
on a site where I typically see 20 or more cranes. I regaled them with stories
of wave after wave of sandhills flying in from the woods, 30 of them on the
ground at once. I told of witnessing the mating ritual in which the male
repeatedly tosses a stick into the air and jumps up with wings outstretched.
As it turned out, not since my
first count nine years ago have I seen fewer birds.
This is not a dire sign of the
sandhill taking a U-turn back toward extinction. They have become quite
numerous. Last year, 13,764 sandhill cranes were counted in Wisconsin alone.
We had gathered before sunrise on
April 18, an uncommonly warm, clear and dry day for the count. It wasn’t
weather that kept them away. The food source was the same as always. The
highway bypass around Hortonville that will claim this land is still on the
traffic engineer’s drawing board.
The cranes start their morning
back in a wooded swamp. I heard two calling as I came out of my house. Shortly
after 6 a.m., a pair of sandhills flew in, putting on a show with their 6-foot
wingspan as they glided down to the farm field.
They would keep us company all
morning. But they would be our only company on the ground.
At 6:17 a.m., minutes after the
sun broke over the tree line, a trio of sandhills flew overhead. Another triple
and two singles followed over the course of the next half-hour. That was it.
With five distinct birds calling
but not seen, our total when the count ended at 7:30 a.m. was 15 sandhills.
More impressive was another count
– two children, not whining, not fidgety, not asleep.
Nathan pronounced counting cranes
that didn’t come not as fun as checking salamanders.
Ella, who had a book to occupy
here between crane flyovers, denied that the morning was boring. “It was cool,”
was how she rated it.
My guess is the two cranes we did
see all morning were a breeding pair that claimed the territory that had been a
bachelor hangout in prior years. We didn’t hear them join in the unison call
that would have testified to them being a pair, so we couldn’t count them as
such, though I have heard the unison call in the field since then.
It turned out that Outagamie
County’s cranes were hanging out around Mosquito Hill Nature Center near New
London, the reporting center for the county.
“The unison calls were all around
us. It was just a symphony,” count coordinator and naturalist Jess Miller said.
Our two birds never came close
enough for a photo. Just to add insult to injury, as I walked from my vehicle
at the nature center’s parking lot, two sandhills flew by at about eye level
not 30 feet away.
The camera was in the vehicle.
