Keep looking up

By David Horst  sandhill7@gmail.com 

The drive to work has gotten a bit less interesting.

A sandhill crane prepares to land at Sandhill Llama Farm 

The snowy owl that had added some expectation to the trip has headed back to the arctic, but she generated a lot of interest in owls while she was here. Several more emails came in from readers with white owl stories to tell.

Robert Petri and his wife were on their way to work. As they passed a Greenville industrial park, his wife told Robert about a delivery man who talked about spotting a snowy in the area several times. The words were hardly out of her mouth when Robert pointed to the roof of an industrial building and said, "You mean like that one?"

Kathy Moderson was on her way home from the funeral for her sister-in-law -- a victim of cancer. She wasn't up to going home right away, so she and her husband went for a drive to check out the area around Outagamie County Regional Airport, where they had read snowy owls had been sighted. They saw nothing at the airport and headed down State 76. There they saw a pair of snowy owls.

"I hope and believe my dear sister-in-law had something to do with that," Kathy wrote to me.

There is something spiritual about a mysterious creature that appears only infrequently. While the snowies have left, spring brings new hope and new reasons to look up.

A friend said she wants to hang around with us because scenes of nature seem to find us. I think it has more to do with being attentive to them, but a recent drive may have proven her right.

We were headed west on State 441 just past the Calumet Street exit when I saw a big bird approaching in my peripheral vision. I followed it as it crossed the highway and saw the distinctive black helmet-like marking on its head and the swept-back position of its wings. I am convinced it was a peregrine falcon.

I checked in with Wisconsin's foremost peregrine expert, Greg Septon. He said a peregrine tried and failed to nest in one of several nesting boxes in downtown Appleton last spring and it is only a matter of time before one succeeds.

We hadn't gone but a few miles, now westbound on U.S. 10, when we saw two sandhill cranes descend awkwardly in a high wind, barely clearing the highway fence and settling next to the recreation trail that runs along the highway.

Around a curve, a large black bird with wings in a "v" hung in the wind, our first sighting of the year of a turkey vulture.

Arriving at home, we were greeted, as we have been every day since mid-March, by the bugling of sandhill cranes. They walk slowly but purposefully across our hay field, searching for bugs and bits of vegetation. Our farm may be unusual in that we welcome the sight of cranes in our fields. In fact, we have named our farm for them.

Robins, red-winged blackbirds, killdeers, turkeys, bluebirds, they all have returned, serving as a reminder that, no matter the challenges that arise, the cycles continue and life endures.