Like cranes, we should follow our inner compass

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Lately I’ve been thinking about love and cranes. This September, on a whim, I booked two tickets to see the sandhill crane migration at the Aldo Leopold Foundation. I had just finished reading “A Sand County Almanac,” Leopold’s landmark book on conservation, and I wanted to see his beloved cranes for myself. But when the gray November day arrived I was having second thoughts, confirmed by my wife.

“So, what are we going to see?” she asks. “Just … cranes?”

Yes, I sheepishly admit, we are driving 3½ hours to Baraboo, Wis., to see the cranes land at their migratory stopover spot on their way southward, and then 3½ hours back to Minneapolis. Seven hours of driving for an afternoon with the cranes. “OK,” she says, upbeat as always. “Let’s just choose an audiobook, shall we?”

We get to the Leopold Foundation a little late for the event, which is already underway with a talk about Aldo Leopold, his legacy and, of course, sandhill cranes. All heads turn as we enter the conference room and slip into the only two open seats. Half listening to the talk, I am also checking in with myself. Why is this so uncomfortable? Has that much changed since I booked these tickets in September? Maybe this was a mistake.

Talk over, we all troop out to the crane blind, our home sweet home for the next hour and a half. More specifically, it’s a shipping container with a row of viewing windows cut into one side. We’ve been instructed to whisper, so as not to spook the skittish cranes. And as we wait — all 18 of us packed like sardines into our shipping container, whispering among ourselves and taking turns looking through the scopes — I can feel a sense of camaraderie taking over. There’s something special about collective anticipation. All around our little shelter, the calls of the cranes are swirling in the air, but none have landed. Our guide tells us that an initial pair will alight and call to the others. We wait. And then there they are, the first two. Little groups of two, three and four begin to join them. The miracle that happens next takes me right into the world of Aldo Leopold:

“High horns, low horns, silence, and finally a pandemonium of trumpets, rattles, croaks and cries that almost shakes the bog with its nearness, but without yet disclosing whence it comes. At last a glint of sun reveals the approach of a great echelon of birds. On motionless wing they emerge from the lifting mists, sweep a final arc of sky, and settle in clangorous descending spirals to their feeding grounds.”

When he wrote those words in 1937, there were fewer than 50 sandhill cranes left in Wisconsin. His “Marshland Elegy” was written to bear witness to the extinction of a species. But this conservation story actually has a happy ending. The evening that I spent in the crane blind, our little posse witnessed more than 600 birds alighting on a sandbar of the Wisconsin River. These days the total population in Wisconsin is over 40,000 birds. One of the major contributors to this miraculous turnaround — as I learned at the crane talk that day — was legislation combined with government policy. The Migratory Bird Act of 1916 protected cranes, whose population had been decimated by overhunting. Government programs to reflood marshlands restored habitat that had been unsuccessfully drained for farming. Turns out, what the cranes needed was some space and some peace and quiet to do what cranes do. And, as it turns out, government policies and actions made a real difference.

As we hike back to our cars, cranes are still circling and trumpeting above us. The tight circles of folks from earlier in the afternoon have loosened, and we chat in ragtag groups strung out along the trail. We’ve been through something together.

Leopold made a distinction between studying the interdependence of living things vs. loving and respecting those living things we find ourselves in community with. The former is ecology, the latter is ethics. Not all of us are ecologists, but we all have our inner compass. We can form a community around the things and places in this world that we love. We can come together around what we value and want to protect. And we can work toward a government that protects what we value. Because when many are pulling in the same direction, things move. Just look at the cranes.

Melissa McPartland lives in Minneapolis and is a longtime early childhood educator and student of nature.