A lanky and mysterious stranger arrived in Provincetown last week, where he is often seen loitering near the famous Boy Beach at the west end. Flamboyantly arrayed in feathers, this visitor has developed quite a following, but it’s not for a drag show at the Post Office Cabaret. The tall, feathered figure is a Sandhill Crane, and it has become the rare bird-du-jour for Cape birders.
They used to be even more rare, but the eastern population of Sandhill Cranes has skyrocketed, especially over the last 20 years. Singletons and small groups are regularly seen here in migration now – back in May, three were seen walking around the cemetery in Provincetown. They started breeding in Massachusetts less than 20 years ago, but now breed regularly as close as Burrage Pond Wildlife Management Area in Hanson, a 1700-acre restored former cranberry bog, which is a great example of “restore it and they will come.” It’s still unusual for one to stick around more than a day or two, which is why this Provincetown bird has been so popular. Back in 2010, an equally confiding crane spent part of each day on a small soccer field right next to rt 6 in Provincetown.
Oft mistaken for Great Blue Herons, or rather vice versa – many uninitiated to birding refer to herons as cranes. They are both tall and blue-gray, hang out in wetlands, and show gangly legs in flight. But they aren’t all that related, check for the distinctive red cap and often rust-stained plumage of the crane. They apparently groom iron-rich mud into their feathers on purpose, likely to serve as camouflage. Cranes have an odd, jerky flight style, with the quick upstrokes and slower downstrokes of the huge wings distinctive at great distances.
I’ll never forget my first experience with Sandhill Cranes. I was probably 22 and camping in the Okefenokee Swamp of Georgia, wherein two loudly bugling adults and their chick crossed the trail just a few feet in front of me. That wild, ancient sound still rings in my ears. I’ve also been lucky to see the great Sandhill Crane flocks at Bosque del Apache in New Mexico, but have yet to see the famous flocks on the Platte River in Nebraska, which are tenfold larger.
You might be surprised to know that, following decades of population recovery across the continent, they are now hunted in many states, where they are known as the “Ribeye of the Sky” – I saw many online claiming it’s the best game bird they’ve ever eaten. Some hunters expressed some regret at killing them, knowing they mate for life, or maybe it’s their oddly human stature, being so tall and bipedal. You can’t hunt them here in New England, for the record, so you can stop sharpening that carving knife and get yourself a regular “ribeye of the ground.”
No one has written better about Sandhill Cranes that Aldo Leopold in his Marshland Elegy essay, each paragraph of which is better than anything I’ve ever written. I’ll leave you with one passage where he says, in reference to the emergence of cranes in the Eocene epoch, tens of millions of years ago, among animals now long extinct: “When we hear his call, we hear no mere bird. We hear the trumpet in the orchestra of evolution. He is the symbol of our untamable past, of that incredible sweep of millennia which underlies and conditions the daily affairs of birds and men.”
So get yourself to the outer lands of the Cape to look for this symbol of our untamable past while you still can. You’ll find it right by Boy Beach.
