A Winter Trip to Crane Country - White Pine, Tennessee

“Our ability to perceive quality in nature begins as in art with the pretty. It expands through successive stages of the beautiful to values as yet uncaptured by language. The quality of cranes lies, I think, in this higher gamut, as yet beyond the reach of words.” -Aldo Leopold, Marshland Elegy, 1948

“Crane country” in the Tennessee floodplains is greeted every winter with a trumpeting cacophony that echoes miles from the intimidating birds themselves. From fuzzy-headed first year birds, to the statuesque, red-capped veterans of southbound migration, they all return to the comforting expanses of less frozen latitudes. Greater Sandhill Cranes (Antigone canadensis tabida) are absolutely incredible birds. They’ve survived all odds to cross a vast and unpredictable continent for a long and tumultuous natural history.

Their footprint on the world is subtle, but important. Crane bills aerate the soil as they hunt for wriggling prey under soggy mud. As they cross miles of cool, damp autumn skies, their feathers are riddled with the rusty stains of red clay and algae. For centuries, the strong, steak-like meat (called “ribeye of the sky” around here) of their flight-hardened muscles have fed tribes, towns, and camps of those who have hungered across the American South, and their giant, v-shaped flocks warn the lands along their route of the new and painful season riding in on the north winds with reverberating calls and shadows cast by their outstretched wings.

Unfortunately, the species has dwindled on the brink of extinction. Now, several hundred thousand are estimated to roam across the lower 48 in winter; but they’re still in danger. This seemingly large number is only a fraction of their former glory. Humans have a tendency to steal their floodplains, and while cranes aren’t terribly averse to living alongside humans, they can’t survive on asphalt and pesticide-ridden lawns. Instead of the watery, winter savannahs where thousands of ducks, geese, and raptors formerly flocked, this population meekly passes between temporarily abandoned cornfields and the saturated ground of desolate cow pastures much farther north than ideal habitats, before they return across the Great Lakes to rear their young in fiercely loyal pairs.