Cranes in Whitney Valley

            I spaded the garden soil. Laura hung wet clothes on the clothesline below the garden. Juniper and Amanda swung in the swings I built for them the second year we lived in Whitney Valley. They sang and made up poems and laughed.

            For the first time that spring, we heard the sandhill cranes. They called from up Camp Creek Valley, and their very loud trumpeting echoed across both valleys.

            Then we saw the two birds. They flew toward us, close above the willows along Camp Creek. Majestic, grey, red-crowned birds, they powered their huge wings down in slow, curving strokes against the clear mountain air, stretched their necks straight, and trailed their long legs behind. They crossed the highway and flew above the barn and then over us, not more than twenty feet above us, calling all the way. They flew across the river and across the meadow and landed by the edge of the timber and fell silent as they began to eat.

            It took us a while to remember what we were doing before we heard the cranes. Laura said, "They came to say hello, to let us know they're back."

            Yes. It did seem like that. We felt knit into the rhythms of the seasons and a part of the life in Whitney Valley.

            Whitney Valley, 4,200 fett up in the Blue Mountains of northeastern Oregon, supports multitudinous birds, birds who thrive in semi-arid land and inhabit the sagebrush areas, birds who live in dense forest, birds who live close to the streams or inhabit irrigated and marshy areas, eagles and hawks who include the valley in their wide range and very shy, rarely seen small rails who hide in the lush grass, dozens of species of migratory birds, and a few species of birds who stay the year around.

            We had only one pair of sandhill cranes in Whitney Valley, but they were among the most conspicuous of all the birds. Sandhill cranes stand about five feet tall, and their wings span seven feet. They often trumpet, so they reminded us they were there every day, even when we didn't see them.

            The book shows how the cranes achieve such volume when they trumpet. Their trachea coils inside them before it extends up their long neck. About five feet long, the trachea is an effective bugle, a long wind instrument of gristle and muscle, alive and flexible.

            Early that summer, I looked up from my shovel-work on an irrigation ditch on the sawmill field and saw one of the cranes about a hundred yards away. I jumped across the drainage ditch and walked into the lower field.

            Cranes are very wary birds, probably because they're so large, it takes work and time to get airborne. The crane didn't like me walking on a diagonal toward it, so it walked down the field, diverging slightly from parallel to my line of travel. I walked faster. The crane walked faster. Soon, I took the longest strides I could and walked as fast as I could without breaking into a run. The crane outpaced me. Those long legs really eat up the ground.

            I fell into a crane-walk without thinking about it. I stepped forward, and as I shifted my weight onto my forward leg, I leaned into the motion. I moved through the step and began to bring the other leg forward, and I swung my head and torso back, so I bobbed forward and backward in a smooth, rhythmic motion. I almost felt like I was a crane.

            That was a marvelous way to walk, totally involved with the step by step motion. I ran out of field, and the crane diverged even farther and walked toward Camp Creek.

            I thanked the crane for that experience. I already felt good, that fine day, and then I felt like I must be glowing all over with pleasure at being alive and being where I was, doing what I was doing, sharing my habitat and my existence with wildlife and coming to understand, to some small degree, what transcending my own, individual existence to include some of the experience of other life around me could become.