How do so many people fall under the big bird's spell?
Their appearance heralds the arrival of winter along the bosque of the Rio Grande — impossible to miss their gawky, graceful flight, loud warbling, Big Bird storming the neighborhood by the dozens. Every nature-lover stops to admire the sandhill cranes in their annual migration from Canada.
But for some people, the love of cranes goes far, far beyond that.
They’re called “craniacs,” a term coined at the annual Festival of the Cranes at Bosque del Apache wildlife refuge, south of Socorro. Each November some 6,000 visitors flock to this weeklong gathering of birders, eager to capture on film or through binoculars one of the most spectacular avian gatherings in the Lower 48: tens of thousands of snow geese and sandhill cranes feeding among the fields and wetlands created to attract migrating birds.
A true craniac is hardly content with one week, though. Their crane obsession lasts all winter, if not all year. Of course, some of them are just birdwatchers who got stuck on one bird. But since cranes are not very typical birds, craniacs are not your typical birders.
“I don’t keep lists,” Mary Pat Day says definitively, distinguishing herself from her birdwatching friends. “For me it’s more the quality of the experience than the quantity.” Rather than checklist a warbled-this or speckled-that, Day likes to plant herself in the Corrales bosque every single afternoon in winter, admiring the sandhill cranes for hours. She never tires of it.
“They’re so graceful, so beautiful. And to watch them interact and display! What an incredible creature, to be able to come from southern Canada to our backyard!” Every week, Day makes the 107- mile drive down to Bosque del Apache to indulge the passion further.
A naturalist from Washington state, she first noticed on safari in Africa that she was more interested in watching birds than lion kills. “It’s then that I realized, wherever I go, I can see a bird.”
And the birds she saw when they moved to Corrales in 1990 were pretty hard to miss.
“It did change my life,” Day muses. Now retired, she serves on the board of the Lannan Foundation, a cultural grant-making organization in Santa Fe, which built an education annex at Bosque del Apache in 2006. Since then, the refuge has been a second home to her in winter — no small flight considering that her other roosts are in Corrales and Santa Fe.
But Day cannot imagine living in the bosque and ignoring the miraculous daily display. “Since time immemorial, people have seen them,” she marvels. “It’s just a gift of living on the Rio Grande. You don’t have to see it on TV! It must be the artist in me.”
Indeed, artists have always been fascinated with cranes, especially in Asia. Chinese and Japanese art is full of cranes on scrolls, paintings, vases, as well as in poetry, myth, and legend. Admired for their longevity and lifelong attachment to one mate, cranes symbolize happiness, prosperity, good fortune, and peace. In ancient Greece and Rome, their dance signified a love of joy and a celebration of life.
“There’s something about a bird that’s human-sized,” says Judith Roderick, a fiber artist who had abandoned the art world until cranes brought her back in the late 1990s. Roderick has traveled to see cranes at wildlife refuges in Wisconsin, Texas, and Colorado, but she says nothing parallels Bosque del Apache.
“At the B&B I stay at in Socorro, I hear them all night — the warbling sound. That’s my favorite, to see them at dawn and watch them. It’s the closest that you can get anywhere in the U.S.” In Monte Vista, Colorado, she saw cranes dancing right near the road, and just set herself down and took photos for hours. “I’m always trying to get better aspects of them,” she says, flipping the pages of a thick photo album.
Roderick’s home is full of crane quilts, crane banners, crane paintings. She has written and illustrated two books of poetry on cranes, and is known as “the crane lady” for the hand-painted silk scarves she sells at the Festival of the Cranes.
A fiber artist who introduced batik and silk-painting to New Mexico in the late 1970s, Roderick co-founded Village Wools yarn shop and did a thriving business selling her hand-dyed silk clothing out of Mariposa Gallery — so successful, in fact, that she got disgusted with the art world and walked away from it.
For several years, she spent time visiting pyramids, studying shamanism, and just sitting in a lot she bought in Placitas and watching the birds — as she puts it, “clearing karma.”
When it came time to return to earth, cranes helped her land. Volunteering at the Nature Center, Roderick decided to make silk scarves for their shop. In the 15 years since, she has not stopped painting the birds or watching them. “You can watch them all day. First one group, then another. They just make such a statement!”
In fact, Roderick’s crane-mania proved quite contagious among her crowd of artists and poets. Recently a dozen of them did a yearlong project writing renga, Japanese call-and-response poetry, on the subject of cranes. “When the cranes left, and then longing for the cranes, the returning of cranes,” Roderick intones with a smile.
The resulting bounty of verse went on display as “Book of Cranes,” a collaborative exhibit of poetry, painting, book arts, and sculpture that just closed at DSG Fine Art in downtown Albuquerque. “It turned out we were all into cranes, separately,” laughs Margy O’Brien, a painter who showed ethereal watercolors, some of which she cut and folded into handmade books.
Poet Dale Harris birthed the idea for the exhibit, and crafted the nearly 2-by-3-foot accordion-style book that anchored the show, each page carrying a crane verse and an artist’s accompanying illustration. Artist Vicki Bolen folded 1,000 origami cranes, a Japanese talisman, while musician Bonnie Schnader accompanied her crane recordings on the harp. The beverage of choice at the opening reception? Cranberry spiked with vodka, since the German origin of the word is “crane berry.”
It should come as no surprise that wildlife biologists study cranes, since they are among the oldest birds on the planet — at least 9 million years old, according to fossils found in Nebraska. But it wasn’t the scientist in him that drew Paul Tebbel to start studying the creatures back in the 1970s. Or that has made him one of the nation’s foremost experts on cranes in the nearly four decades since.
No, Tebbel has not tired of cranes either. A wildlife manager who was director of the Rowe Sanctuary on the Platte River in Nebraska — the nation’s largest gathering site of sandhill cranes — he moved to Sacramento last year to be near his aging parents and serve as executive director of the Effie Yeaw Nature Center. He leads field trips each year at Festival of the Cranes.
“My interest is in using cranes to connect people to nature,” he explains. “Because I can take them out and show them this amazing huge bird, and they don’t just say, ‘There’s a crane,’ but ‘Look — it’s dancing! And you can tell which one is the mom and the dad!’ And they’re big, loud, and quite fun to watch.”
Tebbel wants to connect people to nature so they will understand the importance of habitat, and preserving habitat in its natural state. Of the 15 crane species remaining in the world, all but a few are threatened or endangered. Lesser sandhill cranes are actually increasing in numbers — a case study of successful wildlife management, and a useful barometer of how well it is working.
“If we don’t watch them,” says Tebbel, “the ever-growing human population will impact them. Cranes are a really powerful indicator species for the health of wetlands in a particular area. Cranes need wetlands almost nightly, and it’s easy for them to disappear to development. If you do have wetlands, they’re bound to be there — which adds to the power of the wetland, and the power of the crane.”
Tebbel admits that, over the years, cranes have softened his perspective and encouraged a useful anthropomorphism — useful because it helps people identify with the wild birds. “What other species dance?” he offers. “Cranes do this remarkable thing: They have a lifelong mate, and they’ll dance year round. Sometimes they dance just for the fun of it. Just the fascination of watching a bird that seems to be truly enjoying itself — and they do it with their mates.”
Last year a pair of cranes was spotted in California, he says, that had leg bands traced back to 1987. They had been named Sweetie and Softie, and they were still together, 24 years later.
“So there’s this amazing ability to have and hold on to relationships,” Tebbel says, “which is a remarkable thing in the bird world. It’s just a cool thing to know that birds, which we think of as a lower form of life, have a lot of things they could teach us! I mean they’ve been around for, what, nine million years?”
Perhaps one of the most endearing traits of “craniacs” is when they evolve from admiring the big birds to actually emulating them. If cranes can cross continents and last for millennia, maybe they do have something to teach us.
Erv Nichols was a retired photographer from California, divorced, who had taken to his RV full-time in 2002, and was open to any interesting prospect — like the ad he saw for a temporary volunteer at Bosque del Apache who had experience in desktop publishing. He signed right up.
When he arrived, people advised him that a photographer should definitely check out the morning fly-in. He shrugged. “I could come and go on birds,” he recalls. “I was like, yeah, yeah, I’m from California, we’re hard to impress,” he laughs. “I went out that first morning and never got a single picture. I spent the whole time just watching them.”
Needless to say, he was hooked. After a few years of coming and going, Nichols started volunteering at the refuge full-time. On a bus tour he was leading during festival week, a perky birder kept asking him questions that he couldn’t answer. Sandra Noll had returned to her native New Mexico after 40 years away, and enjoyed coming to the refuge to de-stress from her nursing job in Socorro.
“I had never heard of this lifestyle,” she said of Nichols’ itinerant volunteering, “but it seemed pretty interesting.” Before long, Nichols and Noll had joined forces as “professional volunteers,” as he calls it, to answer the question, “what did we miss in life?”
The cranes were there to help the retired couple find out. They followed an invitation to the Platte River to see Nebraska’s 600,000-strong gathering of cranes, and then just kept following the birds up to Alaska, where they spent the summer working at a wildlife refuge and watching and photographing them.
Since then, Erv and Sandra have become a bit like cranes themselves, migrating from park to refuge to sanctuary, and becoming expert birders qualified to design and lead interpretive programs. “We’ve discovered how intelligent they are,” Nichols says of the birds, “how family-oriented, and how ancient.” Still an avid birder, Noll follows crane research as much as she can. She says studies have looked into whether their flight patterns are a form of communication, and whether they have extended-family flight routes.
“The more you know, the more you want to know,” agrees Nichols — who admits he still doesn’t care much for “little birds.”
The pair have also gained insight into how to warble above their flock. “We’re both ham-ish, and like to talk,” smiles Noll. “So we became certified interpretive guides to compete better” for the plum volunteer assignments. “We can pick and choose at this point,” says Nichols, “so if it’s to do with birds, we do it.” From the Alaska Maritime National Wildlife Refuge down to the World Birding Center on South Padre Island, Texas, the lovebirds stay a while, then migrate on. One perch they return to every year, however, is Bosque del Apache. “Because that’s our route,” Noll says with a nod, “and it’s how we met.”
Just like Sweetie and Softie.
Vital Crane-formation
--> Fifteen species exist worldwide, on all continents but Antarctica and South America. Not all migrate, but species that do form large, sociable flocks at their feeding grounds. The rest of the year, cranes stick to mated pairs.
--> All species but two depend on wetlands for roosting and nesting. Habitat loss and hunting nearly exterminated the whooping crane, one of two North American species. Fewer than 400 birds remain. Most crane species are endangered or threatened.
--> Sandhill cranes have made a comeback since the 1940s, thanks to restoration of wetlands and farmlands to mimic traditional habitat. Each fall, sandhills migrate from Alaska, Canada, and Siberia to winter feeding grounds in the Lower 48 and Mexico. Important stopovers include the Platte River Valley and Bosque del Apache, where many now stay the winter.
--> Because their numbers have rebounded, sandhill cranes can be hunted in more than a dozen states, mostly in the West (including New Mexico, by permit). Hunters claim to prize the meat.
--> Sandhill cranes stand 3 to 4 feet tall and weigh about 9 pounds. They live about 25 years, up to 60 in captivity. They usually lay two eggs a year, and chicks are cared for by both parents until the next breeding season. Young birds join in flocks before breeding at 2 to 7 years old. While early relationships don’t always last, mates tend to stay together once breeding is successful.
--> Cranes can cruise at 45 mph on a good tail wind, riding columns of warm air (thermals). They sometimes cross 500 miles a day traveling in V formation.
--> Communication relies on facial muscles and head feathers, as well as by dancing and calling. Mated pairs make complex calls in unison.
