Out on the Plains & headed home

Last week, Richard and I put 630 miles on our new Subaru Forester in just two days while taking my parents on another drive-a-scenic-byway trip. This time we headed northeast on I-76 from Denver, following the South Platte River across the rolling shortgrass prairie to Julesburg. Once we got away from the suburbs and climbed up out of the shallow South Platte River valley with its irrigated fields, we rolled with the gentle waves of the prairie, the dry tan grassland hugging the soil like a close-napped carpet.

By the time we dived off the twin ribbons of asphalt at exit 170, ten miles short of Julesburg to take the South Platte River Trails byway, the prairie had ever-so-subtly changed. The grasses were now knee-high and taller, and there were more kinds of them, forming a patchwork mosaic in hues from straw to gold to palest orange-going-peach. We had left the extreme aridity of the shortgrass prairie behind, a region so dry that the dominant grasses only venture a few inches above ground while their roots extend as deep as six feet into the sheltering soil. And we had entered the edge of the mid-grass prairie, a slightly wetter belt where grasses grow tall enough to wave in the wind.

As the sun dropped lower over the wide horizon that evening, we circumnavigated the rectangle of the South Platte River Trails byway following rural roads on both sides of the river. We saw the site of the fort featured in the movie "Dances With Wolves" (through the film was shot in Montana), the site of Colorado's only Pony Express Station, a gorgeous and peaceful stretch of the South Platte, and Julesburg and Ovid, two small Plains towns.

The highlights: Pony Express State Wildlife Area, a small patch giving onto the placid curving ribbon of the South Platte, dotted with the golden flames of cottonwood trees in their fall best. The wonderfully kitschy teepee-shaped picnic shelters at the Colorado Welcome Center at the Julesburg exit, and the severely beautiful lines of the enormous red brick beet sugar refinery and its antebellum-plantation style office - vacant since G&W Sugar went bankrupt in the 1980s - in Ovid.

We stayed that night in Sterling, sixty miles upriver on the Platte. The next morning we headed off on the Pawnee Pioneer Pathways byway, a route that meanders on two-lane paved and gravel roads through the prairie between Sterling and Greeley, a hundred miles west. Whole swaths of this route are wide-open grassland with nothing to interrupt the view of the miles-distant horizon.

Highlights of that route: The groups of pronghorn, tan as the shortgrass prairie, that we spotted here and there. The Prairie Cafe with its sign "buffalo served here" in tiny Stoneham (no store, gas station, or other services, just a small cluster of wind-blasted houses, a grain elevator, and three churches). Three pied-billed grebes happily swimming in one small puddle of creek many miles from any other body of water larger than a windmill-filled stock tank. The sight of Pawnee Buttes rising above the undulating prairie like miniature mountains. The ghostly line of giant wind turbines that follow the receding bluff in the hazy distance far beyond the buttes themselves. Walking the trail to the buttes in the chill wind of an approaching fall snowstorm, smelling the moisture on the wind and listening to the glorious silence of the open prairie. Seeing kit fox prints pressed neatly in the pale dust of the trail.

And best of all, many miles to the west where we dropped off the open plains and into the crowded farmland encroached by suburbs, the migrating sandhill cranes. Richard, who was driving, spotted them and simply pointed at the sky. There, high overhead were hundreds of cranes circling in a huge gyre. We stopped on the side of the highway, got out and watched. They circled, wide wings outstretched, long necks and legs extended, higher and higher, sometimes turning into the sun and nearly disappearing, then coming around again so that we could see their ever-smaller silhouettes. Now and then I could hear a fragment of their rolling, wild "khrrrrrrr! khrrrrrr!" calls in the intervals between the trucks rushing by on the highway. As the gyre of cranes began to form Vs and head southwest on what must have been a layer of high-altitude winds, I heard crane voices again. I turned north, and there was another group, this one flapping straight south and lower. We watched them pass, the music of their rolling calls washing over us as they flew overhead, aimed south for the winter.

Hours later, after we had dropped my parents at their apartment west of Denver, we were winding our way up into the Foothills toward the first of three mountain passes we cross on our way home, when I looked at the sky and saw another gyre of sandhill cranes high overhead, wide wings outstretched as they circled, gaining altitude. I pointed them out to Richard and he alternated between watching sandhills and watching the winding highway until the birds were directly overhead and out of view through the windshield. I opened the sunroof and we followed them until they disappeared from view entirely. We sped on, all of us aiming in our own way for home.

Sandhill cranes in spring

It's almost spring, and that means soon I'll hear the husky voices of sandhill cranes calling to each other - "Khrrrr! khrrrr! khrrrr!" - as they ride the winds northward high over our valley. Right now they're gathered, some 20,000 of them, in the marshes and farm fields of the San Luis Valley, one pass south of us in southcentral Colorado, to rest, tank up on food, and socialize during an extended break on their long migration between winter homes in the marshes of the southern Southwest and northern Mexico, and nesting habitat in beaver ponds and wet meadows as far north as the Arctic Circle.

One spring morning, my husband Richard and I loaded our photographer friend Glenn and his case of camera gear into the van, along with our Great Dane, Isis, and left the house in the darkness before dawn, bound for the San Luis Valley to see sandhill cranes.

By the time we reached Monte Vista, it was light. We turned off the road at the marsh where we expected to see flocks of murmuring cranes - and found none. We went to another marsh, and struck out there too. Finally we rolled down the window and listened. From off to the west came the distant swell of crane voices; we drove in that direction, tracking the sound on the chill air pouring in the open windows. Down a dusty dirt two-track, past a clump of still-winter-bare cottonwoods, and there they were.

Hundreds of gray-feathered, red-capped bodies clumped in the stubble of a cornfield, probing the soil, pairing up to leap into the air and dance, jostling each other, lifting long beaks to the ever-lighter sky, and all the while, calling in those throaty voices.

There were tall cranes and shorter cranes, grayer cranes and dusty brown cranes. The gray birds were adults; the brownish ones last year’s young, still carrying their juvenile plumage. The taller birds are a separate subspecies, greater sandhill cranes. They are aptly named: at four feet tall, with wings that stretch as much as seven and a half feet from tip to tip, and weights of up to ten pounds, they almost tower over the smaller subspecies and weigh thirty percent more than those birds.

As Glenn’s camera shutter clicked rapid-fire, a solid ribbon of “Khrrrr, khrrrr, khrrrr!” crane voices rolled over us, a call often described as “bugling,” though it lacks the brassy character of that instrument. It’s a husky and seductive sound, haunting and melodic, that can carry for miles. Now and then the nasal “Krek!” of a young bird punctuated the flow, like an adolescent whose voice is breaking.

Most of the cranes in the mass of birds were feeding intently, pacing through the stubble with measured tread, searching for food. Their long necks dipped in a steady up-down rhythm as their spear-like beaks probed the soil for waste grain and insect larvae.

As the sun came over the horizon, a pair began courting just a few feet away. One bird leaped into the air on long legs, wings spread wide, then landed, legs bent in a bowing motion. The other leapt up too, then bowed; the two stretched necks upward in unison and crossed beaks in a graceful silhouette as if posing.

At night, the tall birds gather in the safety of valley marshes; by day, they fly out to feed in nearby farm fields and wet meadows. As the days grow longer and warmer, the cranes become restless. They take flight at the slightest disturbance, leaping into the air with their long legs and lifting off on wide wings, then circling and setting down again, all the while calling.

As the sun sank below the horizon on that spring day, the sandhill cranes we had been watching began to lift off by the tens and fifties, rising on outstretched wings into the sky, circling higher and higher. Group after group of the huge birds lifted off, spiraled to gain altitude, and then headed north, disappearing into the dusk, until all that remained was the echo of those throaty calls, “Khrrrr, khrrrr, khrrrr!”


I'm talking about sandhill cranes and the valley they call home in spring and fall at the Monte Vista Crane Festival in southern Colorado, this Friday, March 9th at 7 p.m. My talk is sponsored by the Crane Festival and Arkansas Valley Audubon Society. Join us!

Love is what we do best

"Love is how we are together." That's the point of "Knowing What Love Is," my podcast for today. It's not something tangible or concrete, it's a relationship and how we behave.

Thinking about humans and our often troubled and guilt-ridden relationship with the natural world, the living communities that make this improbably green planet habitable, it seems to me that love may be our best talent as a species. And love may be just what we need to draw on to deal with the problems that we are inflicting on our only planet, from global warming to habitat destruction and our own species' overpopulation. If we can learn to live with open hearts, we might well find our everyday decisions have a lighter footprint on the planet. If we can learn to live with open hearts, we might well learn to share more equitably and give other species an equal chance at habitat, food, and the other resources we need for this life. If we can learn to live with open hearts, we might well even like each other better and be able to get along.

I started thinking about the gifts humans bring to the world in my book The San Luis Valley: Sand Dunes and Sandhill Cranes:

What we do best comes not from our heads but our hearts, from an ineffable impulse that resists logic and definitions and calculation: love. Love is what connects us to the rest of the living world, the divine urging from within that guides our best steps in the dance of life. Perhaps what allows a newcomer like me to belong . . . is the same gift that allows humanity to belong to this rare blue planet: an ability to love its miraculous as well as its mundane.

Love is about relationship, and how we behave -- with each other, and the community of the land.