Flirty dancing
WHOEVER took home the Strictly Glitterball last night, rest assured their high kicks and fancy footsteps will never compare with nature’s greatest dancefloor performers.
Common cranes have been tripping the light fantastic across the treeless bogs and desolate moors of Eurasia since the last Ice Age but now their show is very much back on the road in the UK.
And what a show. Cranes, with their stiletto legs and 7ft wingspans, wider than both golden and whitetailed eagles, have courtship displays that have been enthralling humans since the dawn of time. Many a folk dance owes its origins to the complex strutting, wing-flapping and bowing they flaunt to strengthen bonds with life-long mates. Sometimes the sheer joy of cavorting inspires whole flocks to join in the routines, accompanied by bugling calls that can be heard from up to three miles.
Crane choreography is not exclusive to the breeding season. Dances are enacted on wintering grounds and I have been lucky to witness them at Israel’s famous Hula Valley, where up to 40,000 gather in December. Mesmerising.
At one time, crane dance routines were a common sight across Britain and many a village owes its identity to the bird. Cranborne in Dorset, Cranwell in Lincolnshire and Lancashire’s Carnforth illustrate the influence cranes have had.
Cranes were once even more highly prized in regal banquets and hunting cranes in the Middle Ages was the preserve of kings, with only gyrfalcons being able to bring them down in flight. Having been pursued to the precipice in the name of sport, cranes were finally committed to extinction as native British breeding birds around 1600 when their remote wetland haunts were drained and turned over by the plough.
Four centuries were to pass before gawky crane chicks were again on British soil. Occasional wayward birds wandering the skies from Spain to Scandinavia first began establishing a sedentary breeding site on the Norfolk Broads and by the mid-1980s twitchers were making pilgrimages to the “secret” location to witness the cranes’ dance moves.watching them for the first time, the birds’ scarlet top-knots shining in the January gloom, remains a vivid memory.
By the turn of the millennium, a flock of around 20 birds had become established in Norfolk. A report from the Rare Breeding Birds Panel, published this month, shows how the national population has blossomed to between 29 and 37 pairs nesting at 19 different sites across the country and producing a record number of 22 fledglings in 2017.
Behind this remarkable success is a carefully managed reintroduction project masterminded by the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust, RSPB and Pensthorpe Conservation Trust.
Over five years, eggs collected from German cranes were hatched at Slimbridge in Gloucestershire.there, at what has become known as “crane school”, chicks were reared by WWT carers dressed in special outfits and using prosthetic crane heads so the young birds would imprint on what they thought were their parents.
Eventually released into the wild at a secret location on the Somerset Levels, the flock of 93 chicks have gone on to establish a flourishing population, with birds tracked to Wales, Devon and Suffolk.
‘All stiletto legs and wide wings’