Faith of Cranes by Hank Lentfer

Author:Hank Lentfer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Non-Fiction
Publisher: Mountaineers Books
Published: 2011-10-28T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Ten

Snow

The twenty thousand sandhills migrating through Gustavus and on up the Pacific Coast is a sidestream compared to the great river of birds flowing through the continent’s interior. The first flocks drop into Nebraska’s Platte River in late February. Through March, thousands more drift in from wintering grounds along the western Gulf Coast through Texas, southern New Mexico, Arizona, and northern Mexico. A half million cranes, the world’s largest concentration, gather along an eighty-mile stretch of river known as the Big Bend Reach: a braided, shallow slip of water surrounded by agricultural fields. They feast on waste corn, find new mates, or renew affinities with old ones.

Mated pairs often separate in the winter, yet in their cacophony on the Platte they somehow find each other. When they do, they dance, flinging sticks and grass stems with their bills, bowing, leaping, legs akimbo, wing feathers spread wide. Then, standing side by side, bills tilted to the sky, they sing a duet, the unison call: two or three notes from the female answered quickly by the male—two birds, one sound echoing back through a million springs.

At night the birds roost wing to wing, crowded into the shallow waters and gravel islands of the river. At daybreak they billow and resettle into the adjacent fields to feed on corn left behind by the combines. Never are they quiet. In the dark, the landscape purrs with their collective chatter, as if the quiet river suddenly found its voice. In the growing light the cranes ruffle their feathers, stretch a wing to the side, a leg straight back, restless to feed, to fly.

The flock yearns north. The memory of migration ripples in growing murmurs as spring approaches. Birds can sense barometric pressure, a weather station tucked into the folds of each tiny brain. Sometime in early April, when the forecast is right, the carpet of birds lifts from the prairie and spills toward the Arctic.

Cranes are visual migrants; they match rivers and ridges to unique mental maps. They cover up to five hundred miles a day, winging from wetland to wetland. At each stop, they dance, pairs rising and falling through dusk and dawn, creating waves in a sea of gray bodies. Farther north, the threads of birds scatter across the landscape, some drifting toward Quebec, others toward Alaska’s tundra, still others across the Bering Sea to Siberia. The strands break smaller and smaller as cranes fan across the Arctic until, finally, single pairs set their wings and drop through the chilly polar air to the same tundra pond or river delta they left eight months before.

When they arrive, they once again dance. And they sing: three notes and the answering fourth, over and over, with no one to hear, save maybe an Arctic fox or a loon.

_______

My own courtship dance lasted well over a decade, choreographed by twin tensions of affection and fear. I was simultaneously drawn to Anya’s bright smile and held back by my own desire for independence. Our common love of place seemed too precious to last, Anya’s devotion more than I deserved.

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