Towheeblog

Just heard from birding friends in the Ashland area that crane flights are moving north, bugling as they come.  These were heard in the Cascades near Howard Prairie Lake in Jackson County.   Sine stopped there as early as a week ago.  More will be stopping at Sauvie Island and other staging grounds soon.  Some of these West Coast wintering birds are headed all the way to north central Siberia.  Miles to go before they rest…and nest.  The Ashland area observers mentioned their in-flight bugling.  As always it brings to mind Aldo Leopold’s superb  comment on crane music:

“Our appreciation of cranes grows with the slow unraveling of earthly history.  His tribe, we now know, stems out of the remote Eocene.  The other members of the fauna  in which he originated are long since entombed within the hills.  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 the incredible sweep of millennia which underlies and conditions the daily affairs of birds and men.”        —   “Marshland Elegy” by Aldo Leopold