Sandhill cranes’ migration brings in the bird watchers
Annual flight to Jasper-Pulaski has become a must-see event for fans
Sandhill cranes have been migrating between their winter and summer homes, flying in large groups for thousands of miles, for centuries.
But it’s only been since the 1970s that large numbers of those large, graceful birds began stopping in large numbers every fall, and to a lesser degree every spring, at the Jasper-Pulaski Fish and Wildlife Area of northern Indiana, said Allisyn-Marie Gillet, the Indiana state ornithologist.
The state had recently restored some historic wetlands in that area then, and the cranes began making their annual stopovers there.
“It was sort of like a pleasant result we didn’t expect,” Gillet said.
The cranes’ annual visit to Jasper-Pulaski has become an annual event also for hundreds of people who drive to the rural site to watch thousands of cranes arrive just before sunset or take off just after sunrise.
“Some folks come back year after year,” said Nick Echterling, the Indiana Department of Natural Resources property manager at Jasper-Pulaski. “It’s a pretty big draw.”
Every fall, tens of thousands of cranes fly from sites in northern Wisconsin and Michigan, as well as Ontario, Canada, where they breed and grow their young, to their winter homes in southern states.
This year, their fall migration stopover at Jasper-Pulaski, near Medaryville, started slower than last year’s, with only a few thousand of the majestic birds sighted there.
Gillet wasn’t worried.
“It’s been such a mild fall,” she said in mid-November. “Usually, they’re more motivated to go farther south if the temperature is colder. Just like we do, they have their own limitations on how much they can endure.
“I don’t know how they do it,
but they sense when the weather is good to make a migratory journey.”
About a week later, the number of visiting sandhill cranes increased by more than 20,000.
On Nov. 23, 26,652 cranes were counted at Jasper-Pulaski, compared to 25,092 the year before. On Nov. 30, some 27,018 cranes were sighted there.
Jasper-Pulaski isn’t the cranes’ only stop in Indiana. They also show up at Goose Pond Fish and Wildlife Area, an Indiana Department of Natural Resources site near Linton in southern Indiana.
Echterling said more cranes usually stop at Jasper-Pulaski than at Goose Pond during the fall migration, while the reverse happens during the spring migration.
Some don’t even bother flying farther south than Jasper-Pulaski, staying the winter a few miles away near the Northern Indiana Public Service Co. generating plant in Wheatfield.
Up to a thousand cranes stay there during the winter, Echterling said.
“When you look at it from a bird’s point of view, migration is very risky,” Gillet said.
If the Indiana winter isn’t too severe, the cranes that stay can get a jump on the others when it comes time to get back to their breeding grounds in the north, she said.
“They can claim their territory a lot faster than the ones who migrate farther,” she said. “If they can get first dibs on claiming a territory in spring, that’s ideal.”
The sandhill cranes that stop at Jasper-Pulaski belong to the birds’ Eastern Population, a group that had been nearly wiped out by the 1930s because of habitat loss, including the draining of wetlands like the Great Kankakee Marsh, and hunting.
While the Eastern Population has largely recovered since then, thanks to more protection and habitat restoration, the largest sandhill crane populations are to the west.
The birds’ name comes from the sand hills of Nebraska, near the Platte River valley, where hundreds of thousands of sandhill cranes in the Mid-Continent Population — more than 10 times the number visiting Indiana — stop during their spring migrations between Canada and the southern United States and Mexico.