The cranes of spring

Everyone has his own private sign of spring. The croak of the first redwing. The azure flash of a bluebird. Even the musical trickle of water running over old ice. I love all of those of course. Who doesn’t love a sign of spring after a long winter of turning inward. We like to define ourselves by our thoughts, we humans do, but after too long of living with on our intellect, we need the muck and wind of a spring day so we can take a deep breath and remember who we actually are.

For me, spring is the trumpet sound of cranes. They’re back this week. I have heard them three days in a row. Sandhills. Soon they will be circling the marsh and dancing on the muddy banks. They will fill the spring air with their calls until it gets just about as annoying as an errant fire alarm. Fortunately not as loud.

In his essay Marshland Elegy in 1937, Aldo Leopold reminded us that the return of the crane is not just a sign of the annual return of the sun, but a connection to all of our animal ancestors reaching into the dimmest reaches of time. The crane is our brother and our sister and reminds us that the glacier was here and is coming again, that the continents are moving under our feet, that all we see is a brief frame in the film of life. But let him say it:

Our appreciation of the crane grows with the slow unraveling of earthly history. His tribe, we now know, stems out of the remote Eocene. The other members of the fauna in which he originated are long since entombed within these hills. And so they live and have their being - these cranes – not in the constricted present but in the wider reaches of evolutionary time. Their annual return is the clicking of the geologic clock. When we hear his call we hear no mere bird. We hear the trumpet in the orchestra of evolution. He is the symbol of our untamable past, of that incredible sweep of millennia which underlies and conditions the daily affairs of birds and men.