Daybreak Dancers

Natural History, April, 1999 by Scott Weidensaul

Despite a week of searching for a whooping crane, I'd come up dry, and my time was running out. One would think a five-foot-tall white bird would stand out from the gray crowd, but a whooping crane can be tough to find--an ivory needle in a half-million-bird haystack. On my last day in Nebraska, a warm front moved into the state. The temperature rose into the low eighties, and a powerful wind from the south blew grit and dust in my eyes all day. It also blew the sandhill cranes north--scraggly lines and overlapping Vs of them by the thousands, dropping their clarion calls behind them as they went. That evening, the flocks feeding along the road on Shoemaker Island were much diminished, although there were still seven or eight thousand sandhill cranes in one field of corn stubble. Someday--if the Platte River hasn't been sucked dry, if the dun legions of sandhills still take their annual rest in its shallow waters, if this undeserving world is still blessed with whooping cranes--someday I'll come back and try again.

Text adapted from Living on the Wind: Across the Hemisphere with Migratory Birds, by Scott Weidensaul (North Point Press, 1999). Reprinted by permission of Sterling Lord Literistic, Inc.

Natural history writer Scott Weidensaul ("Daybreak Dancers") grew up in the Appalachian Mountains of Pennsylvania, site of North America's most famous raptor migration. A bird bander who specializes in hawks and owls, he is the author of more than two dozen books, including Raptors: The Birds of Prey (Lyons and Burford, 1996). The article in this issue is adapted from Weidensaul's latest book, Living on the Wind: Across the Hemisphere with Migratory Birds (North Point Press, April 1999).