Well, to tell the truth, no moths were involved, but you can’t keep a good phrase down. Saturday’s Sandhill Crane show in Arizona’s Sulphur Springs Valley was one of the most exciting I’d ever seen there. We started with just a few birds loafing at Whitewater Draw, but as the morning wore on, more and more returned from their cornfield breakfasts.
After 30 years of crane-watching, I still can’t get enough of that sound, the first faint growls of the distant flock growing louder and louder until you start to wonder whether there is any other noise anywhere in the world–then, suddenly, the clamor gives way to the conversational mumbles of cranes at the roost.
Ambitiously, we were looking for “other” cranes, too; it’s only a matter of time before this ever-increasing flock picks up a Common Crane. Or maybe a Demoiselle. Or even, someday, a Whooping Crane. But Saturday was not to be the day. We did, though, find the brownest Sandhill Crane I’d ever seen in winter.
The birds in this flock were distant (and oddly enough, in alfalfa), but careful cropping gives us this:
Sandhill Cranes are notorious for applying iron-rich mud to their feathers during the breeding season, likely to serve as camouflage during incubation; oxidation–rusting–turns the feathers bright brown. In most birds from migratory Sandhill populations, the pre-basic molt replaces most of those brown feathers with new gray ones, leaving only old remiges and wing coverts to show a brown wash. Who knows what happened to this one–whether it skipped a molt or just found some irresistibly wallowable red mud somewhere on its autumnal way south?
