Cranes?... Not! Snowy Egrets (photo by Dave Patton)
If you, like me, were raised up back in the 1950s-60s in the farming or fishing districts of south Louisiana, you might have heard the term “crane” used for any white egret. Some people still use that term today! But true cranes are altogether different animals from egrets. Cranes occupy their own family, the Gruidae (15 species, worldwide; 2 species in North America, the Whooping Crane and the Sandhill Crane), and are actually more closely related to the rails and gallinules than they are to the herons and egrets.
Sandhill Cranes (photo by Dan Bertrand)
Each fall they stage fantastic migrations, turning up almost anywhere west of the Appalachians before settling into central California, the southwestern U.S. (including much of the western half of Texas) and northwestern Mexico.
Curiously, a few Sandhill Cranes have been sort of hanging on as year-round/breeding residents along a thin band of “sand hills” (actually, relict longleaf-pine savannas) from southern Mississippi eastward through southern Georgia and the Florida panhandle. Up until the end of the 19th century, Louisiana hosted year round/breeding Sandhill Crane flocks, confined mainly to the longleaf pine savannas of the Florida parishes (southeastern Louisiana) and the mixed tallgrass prairie/marshland complex in southern Cameron parish just above Louisiana's southwestern coast.
Could these year round breeders represent the remains of a relict Pleistocene-era flock forced southward by the massive continental ice sheet which had built as far south as southern Ohio? It is said that at the last glacial climax of the Pleistocene (ca. 12,000 years ago) the entire Gulf Coast was a perpetually cool grassland (much like modern-day central Canada) which extended all the way south through the present-day continental shelf!
If I'm not mistaken, camel, mastodon, and other giant Pleistocene mammal bones have been found at Avery Island, which would have been right in the middle of the Louisiana portion of that massive grassland complex. Could Sandhill (and Whooping) Cranes have nested/lived down here in big numbers all the way back to that era? It wouldn't surprise me.
The first documented record of Sandhill Cranes in Louisiana came from the reports of Le Page du Pratz, an early French colonial planter who spent 1718-34 in Louisiana (about half that time living with the Natchez Indians), recording plants, animals, and first nation peoples. His book, The History of Louisiana was published in Paris in 1758. In it, he referred to “The Crane” as “a very common water-fowl...very lean and of excellent taste. It eats somewhat like beef, and makes a very good soup.”
I also ran across another interesting 18th century reference to a Coulee des Grues (= “Gully of the Cranes”), subsequently located for me by north Louisiana biologist Kelby Ouchley, at present-day Grand Cote National Wildlife Refuge just west of Marksville, LA in northwestern Avoyelles parish. Mentioned in The Historic Indian Tribes of Louisiana (Kniffen, Gregory, and Stokes, 1987), Coulee des Grues served as the boundary between the Tunica and Biloxi Indian nations in 1780.
Interestingly, Grand Cote NWR sits at the northern end of the historic “Avoyel Prairie,” now almost totally under cultivation/pasture, and situated only a few miles east of the communities of Lecompte, Echo, and Cheneyville (Rapides and Avoyelles parishes), where the first flock of wintering Sandhill Cranes was seen by modern humans in 1962. Yet something tells me that French colonials would have never named a waterway "Coulee des Grues" unless they were seeing cranes around it. Real cranes, not egrets; as we've already established that French colonials certainly knew the difference between cranes and egrets.
“Cheneyville Crane” photo by Jim Johnson
In any case, prior to the 1962 discovery, Sandhill Cranes were almost unknown in Louisiana since the turn of the 20th century, at least. Amazingly, as late as 1974 (see Sandhill Crane citation in Louisiana Birds 1974), George Lowery, Jr. himself was not aware of the Cheneyville flock, referring to only a handful of recent Louisiana sightings – mostly of singles and pairs, and mostly from the marshlands of sothern Louisiana – in his book.
Regardless, subsequent to the 1962 Cheneyville discovery (or, probably better-termed, “rediscovery”), Sandhill Crane sightings have slowly/gradually increased each winter in Louisiana, spreading north of Cheneyville up into Natchitoches and West Carroll parishes, as well as south of Cheneyville, down into northeastern Cameron parish and much of Jeff Davis parish. Each year, however, the Cheneyville area consistently hosts the largest concentration of Sandhills, usually with one or two flocks numbering somewhere around 700-1,500 birds.
My first encounter with the Cheneyville cranes came during the winter of 1977 when I was commuting between Ville Platte and (then) Northeastern Louisiana University in Monroe. Just south of Lecompte, I saw four of them in an expansive pasture just a couple of hundred yards off of LA 71. I remember telling the ornithology professor at Monroe about them, but he dismissed my report out-of-hand, as he was wont to do with every report passed along to him by an (ugh) undergraduate.
Among the wariest birds around, Sandhill Cranes require vast open spaces – preferably well-isolated from human habitation – for both roosting and foraging purposes. Drive through the Cheneyville-Echo-Lecompte triangle and you'll note just that – huge expanses of agricultural lands where birds can safely eat and sleep; never allowing human intruders within 0.25-0.50 mile of them. Ditto for the Holmwood area (just west of LA 14 X LA 27E) in northeastern Cameron parish, where a substantial flock of Sandhills has taken up residence each winter for the past 30 years, at least.
Keen birdwatchers are increasingly finding small groups of Sandhills throughout many parts of Louisiana in early to mid-winter – probably foraging fragments of the larger flocks stationed around Holmwood and Cheneyville. Most of these sightings are coming from ag lands; and most often the birds are seen in flight, for when they do put down to feed you can be sure that it will be in the most isolated spots possible.
In flight however, they are hard to miss: huge gray birds with wingspans exceeding that of geese. They're so big that they usually don't take to the air until mid-morning, when thermals created by the sun-heated ground lift them up into the air.
On November 27 of this year, around the Gueydan-Kaplan area in Vermilion parish, Lafayette birder/hunter Toddy Guidry spotted a lone Sandhill Crane flying at the tail end of a V-formation of about 20 Greater White-fronted (aka “speckle-belly”) geese.
Sandhills in Flight
(they're about the size of Great Blue Herons, but with longer wingspans)
photo by Dave Patton
And you can only imagine the shock experienced by Lafayette birder Dave Patton, who sat “day-dreaming at a stoplight” one December morning and watched a Sandhill flock come out of nowhere and put down in the wide-open field right behind the National Wetland Research Center, smack dab in the city of Lafayette! That must have been about 15 years ago...
The “Cheneyville Cranes” photo by Jim Johnson
So what happened to Sandhill Cranes in Louisiana in the interim between the mid-18th century and 1962? Official modern-day records date back only as far as 1899. Between then and the 1962 discovery of the Cheneyville flock, only about a dozen records are on file for our state, mostly involving single bird or single pair sightings. Then, suddenly, they were back. How/why did they decide to return? Curious, non?
Very informative article and the photos were great. Whenever I travel to my childhood home in Red River Parish, I see many flocks of various water birds off of I45 as the crow flies from Cheneyville.
ReplyDeleteYvonne B.