I began bird-watching by accident.
As a biology major focusing on botany, I was required to take a few zoology courses.
During my senior year, I still needed three zoology credits, so I took the basic ornithology course. Much of it was lecture and lab work, but the instructor was a birder, so he included weekend bird walks as a part of the class.
I borrowed a pair of binoculars thinking I only would need them for the semester. After a couple Saturday morning walks, I was hooked. I got myself a copy of the "Field Guide to the Birds of Eastern U.S." and a good pair of binoculars, and started morning visits to places around Morgantown, W.Va.
That serendipitous introduction evolved into a favorite pastime. I still remember the first bird I identified on my own. It was a green heron along the edge of a floodplain pond in the West Virginia University arboretum.
The memories are a big part of bird-watching. During a trip to the Rocky Mountains in the early 1970s, I vividly remember taking a dirt road from Idaho over a small ridge and into Wyoming. Along the bumpy, sometimes barely visible road, we stopped near a small sedge meadow wetland for lunch. While we were eating, the splendid quiet of the mountains was startlingly broken by a raucous rattling kar-r-r-o-o-o.
The moment was unforgettable. My introduction to the sandhill crane.
These, the most abundant of the world's cranes, can be found throughout North America, all the way south to Cuba and north to the Bering Strait. They stand more than 3 feet tall with a grayish body, long legs, and a forehead and crown bare to the reddish skin.
Sandhill cranes feed on all sorts of things, from plant roots, large insects and worms to grain, small snakes frogs and mice. They can push their long beaks into soft soil and probe for seeds and insects. At the same time, they will feed on plants and animals found above ground in the wetlands and fields that the cranes wander.
After my introduction to sandhill cranes in the Rocky Mountains, I didn't see or hear the bird until walking with a friend in downtown Pittsburgh. My friend originally was from Texas, where he saw and heard sandhill cranes often.
That spring day in Pittsburgh, my friend stopped and pointed to the sky.
"Sandhill," he said.
I heard the sound, too, but didn't make the connection, because I didn't expect to see or hear sandhill cranes in Western Pennsylvania.
It turned out that my friend had a good ear, and what he heard were migrating sandhill cranes. It is a rare occurrence, but they do occasionally migrate through, and in this case over, Western Pennsylvania.
That was my second experience with sandhill cranes.
Part of my interest in birding includes checking in with an Internet discussion group that focuses on Pennsylvania birds. In the early 1990s, there was considerable buzz, as sandhill cranes were being seen around southern Mercer, northeastern Lawrence and northwestern Butler counties.
If found in the spring, these could be migrating birds stopping to feed on their way to distant breeding grounds. However, on Aug. 4, 1993, two adult birds were seen with an immature crane. Young birds are similar to the adults but can be easily identified, so the observation of these birds was evidence that sandhill cranes were breeding in Western Pennsylvania.
At the time, a nest had not been found. However, cranes build a low mound out of the vegetation of the surrounding wetland, and such a location would be out of sight and in such a protected location that few people would come across it.
Cranes usually lay two eggs. Incubation is accomplished by the male and female and takes about a month. The young birds stay near the nest for two months before beginning to fly to other habitats to feed.
These sandhill cranes were believed to have nested in State Game Lands No. 151 in Mercer County. There also was a possible nesting near the Erie National Wildlife Refuge, Crawford County, in 1995. These were exciting observations, because they indicated the beginning of a Western Pennsylvania population of sandhill cranes.
Sandhill crane remains were found from the 1600s in Lancaster County, and naturalists in the late 1700s wrote of huge flocks flying over the state, but there never had been records of nesting.
It would take a long time to build a significant population of sandhill cranes. Cranes don't breed until they are between 2 and 7 years old. Adults can live to 20 years, and they mate for life.
As noted, sandhill cranes are shades of gray. However, when they preen their feathers after feeding in iron-rich mud, it gives them a multi-colored plumage of rusty brown. When the birds molt in the fall, they return to their gray plumage.
Many people not familiar with birds comment that long-legged waders such as cranes have knees that bend in a way that is the reverse of humans.
In actuality, a bird's knee is close to the body and hidden under the folded wing. What we see as a knee actually is the ankle. The rest of the bones of the ankle and foot are elongated along with very long toes.
I got my first sight of these Western Pennsylvania birds in a field near Plaingrove, on the Butler/Lawrence county line. It was a blustery spring day, and the magnificent birds were slowly wandering through a farm field probing the cold, wet soil for worms and invertebrates.
It was a long way from my first experience with sandhill cranes in the Rocky Mountains, but it was a great reintroduction.
