The Sound of Hope
Some say they purr. Some call the cry unearthly. What I hear is hope.
Spring begins for me around the first of March, when the early migrants return. As a child, it was the Vs of Canada geese, honking their way north, coming down to feed in corn stubble and to rest a day or two on irrigation dugouts. Later, it was tundra swans, as white as the drifts of snow against fencerows, massed in their hundreds and thousands in the marshes bordering Lake Erie, their deep whooping a background to the buzz of red-winged blackbirds and the plaintive call of killdeer. For decades, these were why I made my annual early March trip to Long Point, chasing a taste of spring to carry me through the last weeks of winter.
Then one year there was a high, warbling call, and two long-legged birds arose from the marsh. The next year there were more. Today, there were hundreds.
Sandhill cranes. A bird that in 1937 the poet and naturalist Aldo Leopold believed would disappear from our skies and fields and marshes: “the last crane will trumpet his farewell and spiral skyward….” (Marshland Elegy). Overhunting would take another species. He was wrong, and for many years now the great central plains crane migration has attracted visitors to the Platte River in March, to watch the birds in their hundreds of thousands. I’ve done that, watched them circle and descend to the safety of the river at dusk, stood in a blind before dawn to hear and see them leave at daybreak. Both the sight and the sound are a memory of wonder and awe.
But that was Nebraska. Today’s birds were in Ontario, home. A place where they belonged once, in the marshes where rivers meet the Great Lakes, and in pockets of wetland throughout the province. Most would always have travelled north into tundra, but some would have nested in the south.
As they do again. Sitting at the side of Norfolk Road 42 today, windows down, engine off, I watched a few hundred birds forage and fly, circling, calling: the return of something that was nearly lost. Nearly, but through work and grace, the farewell was not trumpeted, the final spiral not made, and spring is heralded again by the purring descent of the sandhill’s call over the fields of southern Ontario.
