Spring 2001

First you hear sound — a joyous stuttering; a long, loud, jubilant croak. Wild sound. You could almost make a noise like that. It would boil out from way down in the darkest part of your throat.

You look up and see them. Their shifting lines take up just as much of the sky as they need. Their necks stretch forward and their feet reach back impossibly far; their long and wide wings make broad strokes. They are big, noisy, exultant wild birds.

If you come upon them on the ground, you may witness their amazing dance. Two cranes dance in a sequence of exciting, complex, angled interacting postures. They jump, bow, and stretch in jerky sequence, as if seen through an old stereoscope. It says exaltation, exhilaration, and a frank mutual rejoicing at being wild in a wet meadow on a green spring day.

I've seen them dance at Volo Bog in McHenry County, a place that lives up to its mystical sounding name. And I've also heard their call overhead in the Tilden High School parking lot, on the urbanized south side of Chicago, not far from the Dan Ryan Expressway. As a large flock spiraled up on a current of rising hot air, I arched my neck back to watch them disappear into blue sky.

Sandhill cranes are spirits of the wild. They need space, lots of it.

One of their staging areas is in Jasper-Pulaski State Park in Indiana, a few hours from Chicago. One year I took a drive there. I approached through stubbly fields with soil the color of over-boiled meat. I passed many little groups of cranes out poking in the corn stubble, large warm gray forms looking like groups of shoppers picking through a bin of gloves in a department store.

The staging area at the state park is a large field packed with thousands of cranes. The fence that borders it had hundreds of people stretched out along one side. There was a lot of hum and chit-chat and standing around, on both sides of the fence. The cranes looked like a huge crowd of extras waiting to be called for a wildlife movie. I expected a crew to set up long tables of sandwiches for them. Every now and then, an audition would take place: a coyote quartered through the throng, as cranes shuffled a respectful distance away; a little group of deer appeared quietly at the edge of the woods for the cranes to pose in front of.

A few cranes bobbed up with dance-like gestures. In this setting, it is easy to believe what scientists say crane dance is. It "reflects a general sense of excitement or limited aggression." The word "exultation" does not seem to be mentioned. The cranes dancing in wild Volo Bog seem a world away.

Watching the big cranes in such a circumscribed setting saddens me. Sandhill cranes have always inhabited the big spaces of the Midwest and West, and must be talked about in superlatives. The oldest known fossil of any modern species of bird is thought to be a 9,000,000-year old fossil sandhill crane leg bone found in Nebraska. The 400,000-500,000 birds that stop along Nebraska's Platte River during migration are the largest crane concentration in the world. Cranes have probably spread through the wide channels and vegetation-free islands of the Platte area for millennia. As the river is tamed, they are forced into smaller and smaller spaces, their future determined by irrigation, dredging, and fire suppression. Can this continue to be a country for cranes? Some people are trying to make it so.

At Jasper-Pulaski, the cranes begin to drift back into the marshes in small flocks. I take a long walk back there by myself along the dike. A blue-green band rims the sky, the color a piercing mixture of longing and satisfaction. Inky blue spreading down from overhead squeezes the band closer and closer to the horizon.

At the end of the trail, I meet some friends. The cranes settle noisily into the next marsh, behind a row of trees. Loud trilling calls weave together into a fabric of happy sound. I wrap it around me. My friends take off, unsure about leaving me behind, and I am happy to be alone as blackness comes. The night is thick and velvety. I wrap that around me too, secure in my blankets of crane sound and night. I lay down on the damp pebbles of the dike and wonder what could make me leave this place, and this moment. The moon and stars are out and the cranes continue to call as I melt into the wildness.

After decades of absence as breeders in Kane, Lake, and McHenry Counties, sandhill cranes are now finding places big enough and wild enough to settle in and raise their young. Even in Cook County's Palos preserves, they're back. In most cases, they have come back to wetlands and wet grasslands that are being restored to a more natural - and healthy - condition. They are finding the wild areas of Chicago Wilderness to their liking.

Despite the indignities of their crowded migratory staging areas, sandhill cranes engender hope for a free and open future, a future where we learn to heal the land, and animals respond.

The whooping crane has not had the success of its Chicago area cousin. In 1941, there were only 21 surviving whooping cranes in the world. Now, there are 411. Of these, 266 live in the wild. There is only one migratory flock, in Texas, vulnerable to oil spills, disease, power line collision, and a multitude of other perils.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service would like to create a second migratory flock. They plan to introduce whooping cranes into the flock of sandhills that migrates from Necedah National Wildlife Refuge in Wisconsin to wintering grounds in Florida. This fall, humans with crane puppets on their arms raised sandhill crane chicks around airplane noise and trained them to follow an ultralight plane along their migratory route. Next year, if all goes well, whooping crane chicks will get the same treatment. For some bird species, migration routes are genetic. In cranes, older birds lead the youngest. The cranes are not allowed to see their human foster parents to maximize their chances of survival in the wild.

In a few years, we may look up to see flocks of great white birds, some of them raised by adoptive parents of a different taxa, taught by those humans the flight pattern that in a better life would come from their birth parents, trying hard to be wild birds. I hope they make it. I hope that passing through Chicago Wilderness, where people are learning to live with nature, will strengthen them.

Two species of birds, our wild places, and one two-legged species of mammal. All of us moving together into the same future. What will it be?

Judy Pollock is projects coordinator for National Audubon Society's Chicago Wilderness Program and past president of the Bird Conservation Network.