Crane count brought rare sighting

April 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.