Stepping outside on a recent Saturday, Donna Stanley heard a loud, rattling bugle call.

The park ranger at Muscatatuck National Wildlife Refuge in Seymour said it sounded like background noise throughout the day.

This time of year, that sound can be heard quite often, as sandhill cranes are either sitting in a wet meadow or field or flying overhead as they migrate north.

For many, including Stanley, it’s a peaceful sound.

“It’s really neat when you can hear them. They have wonderful voices. It seems like you could hear their voice a half-mile away,” Stanley said during the Bird Jackson County event Saturday at the refuge.

She said the event was conducted to celebrate “one of the greatest spectacles of wildlife migration.”

“They talk to each other as they are flying a lot to keep in contact with each other,” she said. “They can recognize each other by sound. Of course, all cranes look alike to us. But they know the differences.”

About 20 years ago, Stanley said, the only time you could see the tall, gray-bodied birds in this part of Indiana was when they were migrating in the fall and spring.

Coming from Wisconsin, Minnesota, Michigan and northern Indiana, sandhill cranes would gather at the Jasper-Pulaski State Fish and Wildlife Area in northwestern Indiana starting in October.

“They would hang around for a few weeks in this small fish and wildlife area, and they would eat and socialize, and then they would all take off and head south to Georgia and Alabama and the south country,” Stanley said.

The sandhill cranes would stop in the Ewing Bottoms west of Brownstown, which is on the north side of the East Fork White River.

“They would hang out for a while, especially when those farmlands over there were flooded,” Stanley said. “They just loved those farm fields with shallow water in them.”

About five years ago, Stanley said, the birds started staying in the area the whole winter.

Now, more than 6,000 sandhill cranes spend the winter in the Jackson County area, including the Ewing Bottoms, refuge and farm fields south of Seymour.

“Sandhill cranes are the real treat this time of year,” Stanley said. “Cranes are so neat to watch. They are such fun. They are interesting birds, very bright. They’ve got a lot of personality.”

The birds seen in this part of the United States are known as greater sandhill cranes, and ones found in western states are lesser sandhill cranes. Greater sandhill cranes stand about 4 feet tall, and lesser sandhill cranes are a little shorter.

Stanley said the smart, social birds generally mate for life, with females having one or two babies, known as colts, each year.

“They nest in the tall grass areas, and they are pretty good at raising youngsters,” she said.

Sandhill cranes have really elaborate behavior, and books have been written about what certain behavior means, Stanley said.

They can be seen dancing with each other as a social bonding action, including bowing, back arching, stick tossing, jumping and bill touching. The dance has several functions — to socialize, relieve tension, impress a mate or prepare for the nesting season.

“This time of year, it’s courtship time, and the males are really putting on good shows for the ladies,” Stanley said. “Sometimes, you’ll see them out in the fields, and they are picking up cornstalks and throwing them around.”

The birds also are very excited this time of year, Stanley said.

“They know it’s time to head north to the nesting grounds, and they talk to each other a lot,” she said.

On the ground, sandhill cranes like to roost with just their toes covered with water, and they spend the night in shallow water, Stanley said.

“That’s kind of a safety thing. They are safe from predators that way,” she said. “What I’ve read about the cranes is they’ll post some lookouts at night, and if they hear something splashing through the water, the lookouts will alert everybody, and they’ll take off.”

Sandhill cranes eat waste grain, tubers, insects, caterpillars, grubs, worms, snakes, crayfish, frogs and a variety of things they find in wetlands.

One year, Stanley said, residents on the south side of Seymour had a large group of sandhill cranes near their home and were worried about the birds attacking their pets.

“They are no hazard to livestock or pets,” she said. “They are not at all interested in that.”

While flying overhead, two sandhill cranes together are a mated pair, four could be a male and a female and their babies and six or more could be an extended family group.

“They keep close family ties, as they all kind of live together up north in the nesting areas,” Stanley said. “Even after they grow up, they stay close to each other.”

Occasionally, a whooping crane can be spotted traveling with a flock of sandhill cranes. The rare federally endangered birds are white and carry colored bands on their legs, which is part of Operation Migration.

At one time, Stanley said, whooping cranes lived all across North America, nesting in the northern states and spending winters along the Gulf Coast. Hunting, habitat loss and other problems, however, caused the population to only remain in the Montana area down to the coast of Texas.

Biologists became concerned that a big storm, a disease outbreak or an oil spill could destroy the only wild population of whooping cranes.

Operation Migration was established to reintroduce whooping cranes to their old territory in the eastern flyway. That involved taking young whooping cranes from a research facility in Maryland to a wildlife refuge in Wisconsin and training them to follow an ultralight airplane when it came time to migrate south.

Then when they reached their destination, they later would be able to fly back north on their own.

“Birds normally learn to migrate from their parents, but they had made the trip once behind the airplane, and they knew the way,” Stanley said.

The program, however, experienced setbacks and was suspended about a month ago.

A couple of years ago, Stanley said, one of Muscatatuck’s biologists found a dead whooping crane in a swamp area. Once its band was sent in, they learned the bird was more than 30 years old and had died of old age.

“That’s amazing, if you think what a long migration they make every year twice a year, to get that old,” she said. “Life in the wild is full of risk, but that crane was smart. You wonder how on earth can they survive with no open water with everything frozen, but they do.”

Larry McIntosh of Seymour said he always has admired cranes because of their toughness.

“Sandhill cranes are very resilient, tough birds,” he said. “This year has been a very mild winter, but the two previous winters have been pretty harsh winters, and sandhill cranes have overwintered here in Jackson County. To have two or three days below 0 weather, those birds survived, and it didn’t affect them any.”

McIntosh said he didn’t expect to see any sandhill cranes during Saturday’s event at the refuge. His goal was to find an early warbler species and a winter wren to photograph.

He said he has been photographing birds since 2008, traveling around the country and primarily visiting refuges and parks in Indiana and Florida.

“Muscatatuck is very hit-and-miss,” he said of finding birds to photograph. “It’s all driven by the migration and weather depending on what types of birds are going to stop here versus spring migration. The last several years, the warbler species here in Jackson County, it has not been great in the spring, but it’s usually a better fall migration stopping point for warblers.”

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What makes a crane a crane?

Most cranes have a bright red patch of bare skin on their head. A crane shows this red patch as a warning to other cranes intruding on its territory or home.

Their long beak helps them find food. They also use their beak to drive away other cranes or predators.

Cranes have a loud, shrill voice. Their calls can be heard up to 2 miles away. The secret to their loud call is a long windpipe, which is coiled up inside their chest.

Cranes live in wet, soggy places called wetlands. Long legs make it easy for cranes to walk through tall marsh grasses and wade in shallow water.

Some cranes are more than 5 feet tall and can have a wingspan ranging from 5 to 8 feet.

Some sandhill cranes are gray, but in the spring, they paint themselves with mud so they look brown.

Source: International Crane Foundation

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