Return of the Cranes: A Wildlife Conservation Success Story

Although Aldo Leopold feared they were going extinct, sandhill cranes are now a common sight in rural Michigan.

I heard them first—that haunting, musical call. It’s so unlike any other bird in southwest Michigan that there’s no mistaking it. Then I saw them—a pair of sandhill cranes standing regally in a field, singing in the cool of the morning. There are several pairs of cranes in my area, and hardly a day goes by without hearing their trumpeting calls as they fly overhead from one field to another.

As I listen to the cranes, I can’t help but be glad that Aldo Leopold was wrong. Of course I enjoy reading Leopold’s beautiful prose in A Sand County Almanac as much as anyone, but much of the book is very pessimistic. His chapter on sandhill cranes, titled “Marshland Elegy,” is a case in point. After discussing how land use change has shrunk the habitat for sandhill cranes, he portrays them as on the verge of extinction, despite the massive work undertaken by the CCC for habitat restoration. The chapter ends with this passage:

Some day, perhaps in the very process of our benefactions, perhaps in the fullness of geologic time, the last crane will trumpet his farewell and spiral skyward from the great marsh. High out of the clouds, will fall the sound of hunting horns, the baying of the phantom pack, the tinkle of little bells, and then a silence never to be broken, unless perchance in some far pasture of the Milky Way.

In other, less poetic words, Leopold feared that cranes were going extinct. He didn’t think they could co-exist with humans in a managed rural landscape. “The ultimate value in these marshes is wildness, and the crane is wildness incarnate,” he wrote. “But all conservation of wildness is self-defeating, for to cherish we must see and fondle, and when enough have seen and fondled, there is no wilderness left to cherish.”

Well, I’ve never “fondled” a sandhill crane, and I wouldn’t like to try—their long beaks can be a powerful weapon if they feel the need for self-defense. But I see them all the time, and they don’t seem to mind. They just eye me and my dog as we walk down the road, yelling at us with that “sound of hunting horns” if we get too close, maybe lazily flapping into the air and moving to another field. They coexist just fine with humans in our patchwork of managed farm fields and swampy woodlands and seem to find plenty of food and appropriate sites to raise their one baby.

This pair of sandhill cranes co-existed just fine with people in the Eagle Heights apartment complex in Madison, Wisconsin. I'd often see them taking their baby for a walk in the community garden.

Aldo Leopold should have given more credit to the wildlife conservation efforts of his day. Sure, they weren’t perfect, but overall, New Deal wildlife conservation was wildly successful. We too often focus on our failures, the species that went extinct—the passenger pigeon, the grayling. But we don’t often celebrate the amazing success we’ve had in bringing wildlife back from the brink. In the 1930s, even Canada geese and whitetail deer were nearly extirpated from Michigan. Wild turkeys were totally gone—they had to import them from neighboring states to re-establish a wild breeding population. Bald eagles, of course, nearly went extinct during the era of DDT use.

Today, there are so many deer, geese, and turkeys in southwest Michigan that they are sometimes a nuisance. It’s not rare anymore to glimpse a bald eagle soaring overhead—they nest down by the Kalamazoo River, where the levels of PCB contamination are steadily decreasing. And, of course, there are the cranes, hanging out in farm fields and calling out with that haunting music that Aldo Leopold feared would never be heard again. I’m so glad he was wrong.

There were so many turkeys at Eagle Heights that I joked they should change the name to "Turkey Heights."