Who cares about cranes?—and tigers and songbirds and sparkling streams and hoary ancient forests and traditional earth peoples clinging to old quiet ways of their language and culture—or cares enough to defend and protect what remains of the old world of unbroken and unpolluted nature on our ever more disrupted mother earth.
—PETER MATTHIESSEN, THE BIRDS OF HEAVEN (2001)
By every account, the grasslands of north-central North America were incredibly wild, an ecosystem colored “vivid, as if God had just dyed it” (1905) and bursting with life, with great herds of buffalo, and skies sashed with long flights of passenger pigeons, geese, ducks and cranes. Explorers found grasses “with seed stalks from six to ten feet high, like tall and slender reeds waving in a gentle breeze” (1817) and roots going fifteen feet deep. They described “a vast ocean stretching out until earth and sky seem to meet” (1857), a “prairie-ocean” of beauty each season, “in winter, a dazzling surface of the purest snow; in early summer, a vast expanse of grass and pale pink roses; in autumn too often a wild sea of raging fire” (1872). Before then, in 1835, when Stephen Kearny led a party into northern Iowa, wild strawberries made “the whole track red for miles and stained the horses’ hooves and fetlocks,” and he and his men rode “stirrup-deep through young bluestem grass and flowers, the hooves muffled in a loamy wealth that had been accruing annual interest for twenty thousand years.”
Even as recently as two hundred years ago, tallgrass and shortgrass prairie covered much of North America, from central Canada down through Minnesota and Iowa all the way to the Gulf of Mexico, and east to west from Indiana to Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, the Dakotas. Most of that wild grassland is gone now, some of it paved, much of it tilled—of the tallgrass prairie that once covered 40 percent of the lower forty-eight states, only 2 percent remains. I have come west from Minneapolis to see some of that 2 percent, a road trip with stops first here, near the North Dakota border, then down to Nebraska’s sandhills to see a hundred thousand cranes.
My host is Ray Norgaard, a veteran of more than four decades with the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources. We meet in a gas station parking lot just off the interstate where we will leave my car and take his silver Chevy truck into the western Minnesota countryside he knows so well. Dressed in a green flannel shirt and dark green canvas pants, Ray wears a faded gold cap that reads “Ducks. Wetlands. Clean Water.” And this is why I have come to spend the day with him, driving straight dirt roads framing endless fields, exploring one of the great bird flyways in the world.
Stretching north from northern Iowa across five US states and three Canadian provinces is the three-hundred-thousand-mile prairie pothole region, so called because of the pockmarks left behind some ten thousand years ago by retreating glaciers—ice that in places was five miles thick. As this ice retreated, it left millions of depressions in the ground, sometimes forty per kilometer, a kind of Swiss-cheese landscape.
And here’s the key: while for many of us the word “wetlands” might conjure a pond or swamp, these temporal, or ephemeral, wetlands are wet for only a few days to a few weeks each year. The rest of the time, they look like just another sway in a sea of rolling ground. But in the short period during which they hold water, they come alive with invertebrate life, the aquatic insects that fuel a duck’s flight.
At one time some twenty-five million potholes covered this region, and more than a hundred million ducks—maybe far more than a hundred million—filled the sky. Even now, some twenty million ducks pass through the prairie pothole region—pintails, mallards, gadwall, blue-winged teal, shovelers, canvasbacks, and redheads (not to mention birds heading farther north to boreal forest and the Arctic—wigeon, green-winged teal, Canada geese, snow geese). This ground is host to “one of the five greatest animal migrations on the planet.”
So says Johann Walker, director of Conservation Programs in North and South Dakota for Ducks Unlimited, a group dedicated to conserving wetlands and ducks. He explains that the pothole wetlands produce high levels of invertebrate biomass, which “is really important to ducks when they’re breeding—for egg formation, for maintaining their own body, and for growing ducklings. These wetlands are unique in the world—there’s not another prairie pothole region anywhere on the globe.”
From a duck’s perspective, these shallowest and most ephemeral of wetlands are the best wetlands. But from a farmer’s perspective, they are easily drained for the growing of crops. In western Minnesota, most of this drainage took place before the 1930s, as the tallgrass prairie disappeared. Since that time, North Dakota has lost 72 percent of its native grassland (turned into cropland), South Dakota 64 percent, and Montana more than 55 percent. In the Canadian provinces of Saskatchewan and Manitoba, the losses are even worse, and Alberta has lost half its native grassland. Over the entire prairie pothole region, about 40 to 50 percent of the original wetlands have been drained—though in Iowa and Minnesota that figure is closer to 90 percent. What troubles Ray, though, is not so much what has happened as what is happening: the increased use of new drought-resistant corn varieties combined with high prices for corn and soybeans has led to rising land values and a surge of wetland loss in prairie Canada and grassland loss, especially in the Dakotas, where duck habitat is under serious threat.
“We have been in a wetland crisis for more than half a century,” Ray tells me. “On the prairies of Minnesota we’ve lost ninety percent of our wetlands, and in some counties almost all. In addition to that, we’ve got a wetland quality issue.” In the fall of 2015, the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency released a study showing what he means. Among their findings: on Minnesota prairies only about one in five of the remaining wetlands have good quality. You have to get up into the northeast part of the state before you find good-quality wetlands.
“So,” Ray continues, “in this part of the world we’re down to the last ten percent or less of our wetland basins, and then fifty percent of those are really of very little benefit. They retain some floodwaters, but from a wildlife standpoint and from an ecological standpoint, they’re just bathtubs.”
We pull off the road and walk into a depression, a shallow bowl in the middle of a field. Ray tells me that fifty years ago, the ratio of temporary and seasonal basins to permanent basins was 20 to 1. But now, he says, that ratio is only 5 to 1. This depression in which we stand is one of those temporary basins, the kind that hold water only for a few days or weeks. They are the most important for hens for nesting, and critically important for migrating shorebirds looking for food. This is the wild ground that keeps this migratory flyway alive. And, I admit to Ray, if he hadn’t stopped the truck and pointed this out to me, I would never have looked over here and known what I was seeing. “Oh, absolutely,” he says. “Most people wouldn’t.”
Back in the truck, we watch as a pheasant brood—a half dozen chicks, little golden-brown, black-striped fur balls—scurry off the road ahead of us. “I bet they’re not even three weeks old,” he says, laughing.
Ray’s laugh reminds me of the animation in Johann Walker’s voice when he told me of his first year in the prairie pothole region, and how he would periodically visit duck nest sites to see if they had survived. “And you could pick up the egg. And the little duckling inside had maybe just busted a very small hole in the shell, and you could whistle, just a peep-peep-peep at the egg, and the little duckling inside would whistle back at you.” He paused. “That was a big moment for me, just to be standing out on all that prairie and to have a vague notion from our sampling hundreds of acres every day of how many hundreds of nests were really out there on the ground, with how many eggs in them, and here I was holding one of those in my hand, watching that little life emerge.”
The original grasslands in all their glory are something we will never see. “The most decimated ecosystem in continental North America,” the prairie is sometimes called. Gone are the grizzly and the wolf, and the populations of nearly every species—bird, animal, plant, and even insect—are severely reduced. In the past decade, as the monarch butterfly began to disappear, it marked the latest species to decline.
But still there is a wildness in the ground that brings the prairie potholes alive each spring, for days or weeks or months at a time. Dry beds in the landscape, shapes to which most of us would be blind, are the shallow basins in which so many lives will form. The ducks that visit our city skies, that flash past in fast Vs over suburban lakes and ponds—those ducks are made of this ground. This is the fountain of energy that Leopold spoke of, rising from soil into sustenance into brown and gray-white bodies, cinnamon and emerald heads. This is that fountain rising into beaks and feet, eyes and wings.
“What really drives the system is invisible,” Ray says, turning the Chevy back toward the interstate. Yes, but sometimes, it seems, the evidence of that invisible life is everywhere for us to recognize. Just a day’s drive south of here, one of the world’s greatest remaining displays of wildlife still settles from the sky to share the ground on which we stand.
It is from the oldest of worlds, an ancient sound and sight still available to us today, the wild birds standing four feet tall, their wings wrapped like shawls. The sandhill crane, which at twenty million years and counting is the oldest living bird species on Earth, comes to us essentially unchanged through time, essentially the same bird that has always been here.
In predawn darkness, I rise with excitement and come east on I-80 before turning off to follow red taillights, a long line into the parking area, a blustery morning with last night’s Milky Way hanging washed in the southern sky. And then, a crimson waning gibbous moon near the horizon, I hear them in the distance, the unmistakable call that had drawn me from sleep to come bundled in wool and down to join a hundred others at the edge of Nebraska’s Platte River. After introductory remarks from the Rowe Sanctuary folks, we walk without words to our lookout points, wondering how many we will see, whether we will luck out or miss. The blinds are wooden structures like mobile homes, with paneless window cuts on the river side. We slide through the door and take our positions, to wait and watch and listen.
Since reaching Kearny yesterday and seeing my first cranes, I have remembered how much of their appeal comes from their call, a sort of purring, trumpeting trill caused by the unique shape of their larynx. At this point this morning the calls are grounded, as several thousand sandhill cranes stand on sandbars in the river before us. The volume of calls and the light in the sky seem to grow in sync, and then on some undetectable sign the cranes lift from their sandbar roosts in the shallow river and leap into the orange light that just now comes over the horizon, a sudden cacophony lifting into the dawn air, golden light on bellies and wings, first one section of the great flock then another, leaving the place where they spent the night, and a sort of euphoria ripples through the blinds as the gathered humans smile and want to cheer but know to stay quiet. After the bulk are gone you still hear from straggler cranes echoes of what was here.
“Whichever road I follow, I walk in the land of many gods,” writes Linda Hogan. My senses still humming from having been on the ground that launches these descendants of ancient birds, I think of her words. “Suddenly all my ancestors are behind me. Be still, they say. Watch and listen. You are the result of the love of thousands.”
I first saw sandhill cranes in a New Mexico November twenty years ago. Hiking with friends at Bandelier National Monument, we watched as one drifting flight after another of these majestic birds floated over in the deep blue sky between the canyon walls. They were flying south following the Rio Grande, many making their way down to the Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge seventy-five miles south of Albuquerque. Since then I have seen cranes many times at the Bosque, traveling various dawns to watch the great rafts of birds leaving the refuge before sunrise, and various dusks to watch them return after a day of feeding in surrounding fields. But until this visit I have never had a chance to see the annual migration of between four hundred thousand and six hundred thousand sandhills coming through central Nebraska on their way north. It’s a migration that has been going on seemingly forever, and that now relies almost entirely on our treatment of the ground.
On a map of North America, the crane migration routes flow south from the top left, from Alaska down through Canada, and from the top right from the Canadian Arctic, the two streams bending together like an hourglass with the narrowest waist over this part of Nebraska, then spreading out southwest to New Mexico, Texas, Mexico, and southeast to Florida and Cuba. They didn’t all used to come through on such a narrow band along the Platte. But due to human development on traditional resting, feeding, and mating areas, the bottleneck has formed. Agriculture along the Platte has increased crane numbers by offering a landing area with abundant food. Since the 1950s, the mechanical corn picker has provided the cranes with an almost unlimited high-energy food source, the corn left over after harvesting. That’s why if you travel to the Platte in the spring you will see groups of cranes spending their day picking through the fields. Typically, the cranes stay for several weeks, adding about 20 percent to their body weight before continuing north. In their long migrations, the cranes rely on stopovers like this one on the Platte to store enough fat to reproduce successfully.
But their future is anything but secure. Corn farming is becoming ever more efficient, and the “beans” part of the “corn and beans” recipe for American farmland has reached these plains as well. The area around the Platte that once was purely corn is now about half soybeans, and as wildlife biologist Gary Krapu tells me, “Soybeans are worthless to cranes.” Krapu, who recently retired from the US Geological Survey after a career working with cranes, adds competition for water in the cranes’ wintering grounds and hunting along their migration routes as additional threats to their survival. And looming over everything is the threat posed by a changing climate.
“Cranes have been here a very long time,” he says, “and they’ve seen huge changes in the climate on the North American continent. But they didn’t occur overnight, and they were of a different nature than what we’re experiencing now with human impacts.” Already, of the world’s fifteen crane species, twelve are listed as endangered. And while the sandhills are the most numerous species, a simple change in agricultural policy—such as favoring soybeans over corn—could, one biologist told me, “send the cranes into a tailspin.”
It’s hard to believe that a species as old as this bird could now be so fragile. From the first moment I saw them, these creatures with their six-foot wingspan have taken my breath away. The more I learn about them, the more I am amazed. For example, Krapu tells me that pairs will return to the same breeding ground, even the same nesting site, to which they migrated the previous year. Returning, that is, from many thousands of miles away.
But all around the world, centuries-old long-range bird migrations like that of the cranes are being slowed or stopped by our use and abuse of the ground. Recent headlines include “Migratory ‘Flyways’ Decimated by Human Expansion,” and “Habitat Loss Seen as Rising Threat to World’s Migratory Birds.” As I had seen in the prairie pothole region, migratory birds need healthy ecosystems along their path to serve as rest stops on their often transcontinental trips, yet at least half the world’s wetlands have been lost during the past century. In a recent study published in Science, researchers examined the “migratory routes, stopover locations, breeding grounds, and winter locations of 1,451 migratory species” and found that 91 percent traveled over ground that is not protected. Because migratory species by definition move from one area to another and rely on a series of landing sites to provide food and rest, explains Richard Fuller, an Australian conservation scientist, “if even a single link in this chain of sites is lost for a species, it could lead to major declines or even its extinction.” Another of the study’s authors gave the example of the bar-tailed godwit, which migrates from the Arctic to Australia, stopping along the way at mudflats in China, North Korea, and South Korea. “Many of these critical sites have been lost to land reclamation owing to urban, industrial, and agricultural expansion,” says conservation scientist Claire Runge, “and the species is undergoing a rapid decline.”
I remember being in the blind during the morning, looking toward where the cranes had just left the river, realizing that they had been out there all night. I mean, it’s not as though they all sail into a warm, safe airplane hangar every evening. No, every evening they sail instead to the sandbars from the fields where they spent the day. They then stand there through the night, waiting for dawn. The whole time I’m in the hotel sleeping, waiting to rise to witness them, they are out here. And the rest of the year while I’m doing whatever I do, they are out here—or in other wild areas, dodging bullets, finding food, waiting for currents in the wind, returning to the very ground they knew the year before, pulled by some old yearning at which we can only guess. Of course our choices affect them. Of course our bullets knock them from flight. Of course if we take away the grounds on which they depend, their numbers will dwindle to a whisper of what they are now. But otherwise, they exist as they have always existed.
When they fly their flocks often swirl and seem without direction, a gathering stream. Then from a distance their long flights look like pieces of black thread laid out against the purple dusk. At twenty years or more they are long-lived birds, and they will sometimes fly five hundred miles each day. For me, their migrations mean something similar to seeing the stars. They are evidence of something that includes us, but is bigger than us, of a force that goes on around us and without us. But with our building and paving we have halted so many wild migrations, from large to small, the movements that animals and birds and fish and reptiles and insects (monarch butterflies again come to mind) have followed forever, circulating through the world as the blood through our heart and limbs, the breath through our lungs, the spirit that gives us life.
I think about a conversation I had with Jeb Barzan, director of field ecology for the International Crane Foundation, about the value of the ground for a bird that migrates so many miles each year, spending so much time in the air.
“All fifteen species of cranes nest on the ground, and they can nest nowhere else,” he said. “Although these birds can fly, the first ten to twelve weeks after they hatch they stay on the ground, and their survival depends on their ability to be safe there. It’s a very vulnerable time, and they live or die based on that strategy.” The cranes’ ultimate survival is going to be dependent upon how people use those grounds, Barzan explained.
And if we care about that survival, we cannot rely only on “protected” grounds. In North America, for example, only about 25 percent of the land is owned by government; 75 percent is privately owned, and most of that is in agriculture. As Barzan told me, “It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that if we’re going to provide for biological diversity, of which cranes are a charismatic representative, we have to focus on what happens on those private lands every bit as much as what happens on those public lands.”
Two recent studies raise troubling questions about our ability to do that. In the first, researchers found that development and population density around our national parks has greatly outpaced growth elsewhere. While the percentage of population density increase in the United States since 1940 has been 113 percent, around national parks it has been nearly double that, at 224 percent. And while the percentage increase in population densities around specific parks varied (for example, 210 percent around Glacier and 246 percent around Yellowstone to more than 3,000 percent around Mojave National Preserve), every park in the national system saw human development increase around its borders. The second study focused on the National Wildlife Refuge System, a nationwide system of nearly 500 units. In results similar to those of the national parks study, researchers found that the amount and density of human development around refuges far outpaced national averages.
What this means is that the wild grounds we have designated as protected are slowly—or not so slowly—being encircled by human development, becoming islands of wildness in an otherwise tame sea. This matters for several reasons. For one thing, animals don’t recognize artificial boundaries between public (protected) and private land. As our populations encircle the areas used by wildlife, there are bound to be more human–wildlife confrontations. Other problems for wildlife include the introduction of invasive species, “subsidized predators” such as feral cats, chemical pollution from pesticides and fertilizers, and the disruption of historical migratory routes. This last consequence is probably the thing that worries scientists most. If wildlife cannot move from one area to another to mate or feed, their ability to survive will diminish in a world rapidly being changed by a disrupted climate.
In the evening I park and walk a long way in constant wind, following the sound, drawn toward them, wanting to be close. I continue walking past the bridge where the photographers and tourists wait, past someone’s house—a giant swing in the yard, they must have children—and think What on earth must it be like to live and grow with a visit from five hundred thousand cranes every year? I turn down a long dirt road. I feel the wind, see a yellow setting sun in the wheat, feel single raindrops splat my cap’s bill, my hands, my feet. I follow the ancient sound of cranes returning at dusk, the great flights descending, coming in after the day of gathering energy from the cornfields, this wild, ancient ritual repeated here before me in a world gone so crazy and broken and out of control. All these birds that have moved across the continent longer than any other, that predate anything we have done, are here still alive.
I stop in the road. To my left are the gathering flocks, to my right a field of wheat. It is like being up close to something back in time. Like a secret still going on. What are we if not a creation of days and experiences, of moments we have stopped to notice the world—the faces of family before us, the beauty of distant mountains, the ground at our feet. I am made from times like these, when I follow whatever voice I heard—who knows where it comes from?—and walk out alone along dirt roads to find a scene like this.
I turn into the field opposite the cranes and lie down on the earth, my surrounding horizons the swaying stalks and tassels, my sky dark blue-gray billows lit yellow-gold by a declining sun. Again and again the long flights pass over me, some higher, some only a few dozen feet above, wings braced for slowing, long gray feathers together in perfect ancient design. Sticklike legs and trident feet extending back, hanging down. Crimson-red crowns, black-fringed tips to blue-gray wings, shaded with gold light, the colors of thunderclouds.
As red-winged blackbirds sing, setting sunlight shines on the cranes’ gray bellies, on the plains, as though the same golden energy that fills their wings fills the ground on which their feet will land. This ground feels akin to that of the West—the dry air, the cottonwoods, the big sky—even though it’s of the plains. What has passed beneath me? A thousand thousand years of animals moving, eating, mating, dying—the bones below us we never will know. This outermost surface of the earth all the while becoming the richest soil.
Single drops of rain, and the steady calls of cranes. In his essay “Thinking Like a Mountain,” Aldo Leopold described the wolf’s howl as “a wild, defiant sound.” The crane’s call is another of the world’s wild, defiant sounds. Gathering for the night, it’s as though they’re calling to friends and family stories of the day, all the amazing things they saw and found. And what a life, journeying north and south with the seasons, and all the little cranes, colts that will be born into this threatened world, what world will they come into? But they will come. I have faith in that.
Booms of thunder welling in the east and south chase me back onto the road. The dark horizon backdrop is filling with lightning stems and blooms. I hate to leave, but great bolts brand the sky. It’s like walking away from a rushing river. Will they sound through the storm? Or do they quiet, listening for creeping coyotes?