I’ve been meeting up with the sandhill cranes in southern Colorado for more than 20 years now, and it’s always a good idea to get rid of any expectations of what I will find or experience.
The first year I went to the Monte Vista Wildlife Refuge I was disappointed at first. The town of Monte Vista, just north of the refuge where the cranes hang out, looks impoverished, especially after the wealth of the Front Range. Houses are small, with dirt yards, old cars piled in the yard, and few trees. On the drive to the refuge, the land is flat, with sad-looking farms and ranches. Only the jagged peaks of the Sangre de Cristos to the east and the lower hills to the west make this landscape remarkable in any way.
On the wildlife refuge you can drive around the few ponds in less than a half hour. Our first year there we saw a few cranes standing in the fields, a disappointing experience after our five-hour drive down from Boulder. But then as the sun started to set, cranes started flying over our heads where we were parked alongside the edge of the refuge: first a few, then hundreds, and eventually thousands, filling the air with their strong wingbeats and ancient cries. In the distance, the Sangres turned a deep red, the blood of Christ, as the sun went down.
Every March when I head down to see the cranes I look forward to that grand finale of the day, but every year the experience has been different: one year a blinding blizzard so we could hardly see the cranes; another year most of the cranes had already migrated north before we arrived. This year we arrived to find that most of the ponds on the refuge were frozen, and the cranes were finding shelter for the night elsewhere, scattered around on the fields. I felt cheated of that overwhelming experience, the one that gave me goose bumps.
But something else did. One morning, we were out at the refuge with nothing much going on: the cranes were too far out in the field to really see, and only one pond was not frozen, with a few geese and ducks enjoying the water. But when we stopped at another pond, still mostly frozen, I saw something I had never seen before. A male hawk flying low over the marshes suddenly flew straight upward, as if catapulted into the sky. Just as unnerving, after the northern harrier attained a huge height, it suddenly plummeted back to the earth in what looked like a death spiral, like a small plane that had lost control. But before it crashed into the cattails, the hawk pulled itself up and repeated the performance, over and over in what seemed like a death-defying flight.
The performance, we realized, was for the female harrier, soaring nearby. Amazingly, she copied his performance, soaring straight up to the heavens and them spiraling back down, over and over. At one point, the two flew together, intertwining their flights in an aerial ballet.
It’s hard not to let your heart soar with these birds, to almost feel your feet lift off from the solid ground. I didn’t even think about taking a picture, because I didn’t want to miss one minute of this display. While we stood there, utterly captivated, cars drove past us, and I kept waiting for someone to ask what we had seen. But no one did; if they followed our lead and glanced to the sky, they didn’t see any cranes, which was the whole purpose of their visit, so they weren’t interested.
But if you drop your expectations, anything can happen. One morning we got up before sunrise, and when we arrived at the refuge, the sky was gray and featureless. Nothing was stirring, except for the line of photographers, until the sun’s rays appeared between a crack in the Sangres. It was as if an alarm clock went off. Cranes, geese and ducks started streaming across the orange and yellow sky from every direction, crying and honking in a cacophony of sounds that was like music to my ears (top). In front of us, some settled on the pond, where steam rose and curved around their bodies, silhouetted in the yellow glow of the sunrise (bottom). Turning in every direction to see the birds, I didn’t notice the cold until afterward when my hands started to ache. When the sun came fully up, I basked, like the birds, in the warmth.
Later that afternoon, through my binoculars I watched the cranes fly and felt a deep envy. With the snow-covered fields below, the brown hillside in the background and wide sky above lined with flimsy clouds, these ancient creatures looked as if they were suspended between earth and heaven. The cranes, one of the oldest living species on earth, inhabit a space we have little knowledge of—a place where they are skilled far beyond our puny accomplishments and have a freedom we can only imagine and yearn for.
Watching the cranes—how effortlessly they flowed across the sky, stroking the sky with their huge wings—I thought how they were the gods and we were mere mortals. I wanted to join them, to be released from this earth and soar as far as I wanted, but even the cranes must come back to earth.
