Have you read William Faulkner’s “The Bear”?īut the shooting of that crane was not hunting for sustenance. And many hunters revere the natural world as much as non-hunters. I have nothing against hunting, as the legal taking of game is part of the cycle of the seasons.

The crane died three days later, and the Flint Creek Wildlife Center in Barrington was offering a $2,500 reward for information about the shooting.Īs I read the article, I felt deflated, defeated and dejected. The despair I felt earlier on Wednesday, long before that full moon rose, came from reading in this paper, the Sun-Times, that someone had in fact shot a sandhill crane in Lake Villa. That has always been a worry, that someone would shoot a crane. Mates? So when I saw this single whooper now, my calm turned to alarm: Where was the other one? Had something befallen it? Was this a different whooping crane from the earlier two? Three or four springs back, on another mass migration day, I had seen two whoopers flying side by side in a small skein of sandhills. It stood out, and I felt that inner calm, but only for a moment.

It was also a special moment because there was a lone whooping crane tucked into a small skein of its sandhill cousins. They had become part of the fabric of my life. It was a special time, as I had come to feel as if those cranes, and the past generations I had watched years ago, were as close as friends and family. Loud, raucous and colorful - full of life! - they swirled above me as they got their compass bearings: 300 degrees, north by northwest. In the first half, a Sunday as I recall, thousands of cranes flew over en mass in the course of just an hour or so.

This past spring, the crane migration I witnessed broke into two huge halves just about a week apart.

Close to where I live now is an area that I think of as their “rallying point,” where hundreds and even thousands of cranes meet, swarm and coalesce in mid-air on their way north. Was it the position of the spring sun or a recent full moon?Īlthough I have moved out of the 10th Ward since then, I have not left the cranes behind. As the cranes passed overhead, I would wonder what had set them in motion from their winter homes in Southern states like Tennessee and Georgia.

Backyard cranes in the sky