Tag: sandhill crane

And Who Might You Be?

A lesser sandhill crane stands in a meadow near the Beaver Ponds Loop Trail in Yellowstone National Park

I wasn’t sure what I was looking at when I came across this crane in Yellowstone National Park in 2004. I was only aware of two species of crane in my country, the sandhill crane and the whooping crane. It looked like a sandhill apart from the brown coloring on its body, so I wondered if it might be a juvenile. Later research showed this to be a subspecies of sandhill, the lesser sandhill crane.

We’re moving to Arizona soon (we’re in Arizona at the moment, we found a house yesterday we’d like to rent), so I’m going to have a lot to learn as I explore my desert home. No matter how long I live here I’ll still come across identification puzzles, I still do even after being in Oregon for 21 years, a combination of my lack of skills and nature not always being so easily pinned down.

We Three Cranes

Three sandhill cranes fly in formation

Three sandhill cranes, part of a much larger flock, fly in formation over Rest Lake at the end of a cold winter’s day. The skies above Ridgefield can be noisy in the winter, usually from the large flocks of cackling geese and tundra swans that overwinter at the refuge, but particularly early or late in the day sandhills may join the chorus.