Death, visitations, and dance of solidarity

---For July 2 photos on Christy Yuncker Photo Journal, click here.

On July 2, we were aroused at 7 AM by unison calling of Roy and Millie. Twin colts, Jacques and Phyl, had trailed their parents around our cranberry bog for almost three weeks since hatch on June 10^th and 11^th. At 10 PM on the previous evening, the colts snuggled under Millie's wings and slept at the habitual family roosting site among grasses and cattails on a point jutting into the pond.

When we glanced at cattail point that July morning, we saw Jacques running back and forth between his parents, looking for food. The adults flapped their wings twice, peered down at a tawny mass half-hidden in the grass, preened, and walked around. After careful examination through a spotting scope, we saw that the object of their gaze was Phyl's inert body. The photo above shows Millie looking down at Phyl.

Fifty-five minutes later, Jacques watched as Millie and Roy called again and then exchanged duets with a pair of cranes across the valley. When the conversation finished, the smaller family continued to forage for insects.

Phyl's death that night was not a total surprise to us. The temperature on the first of July was almost 80º F, hot for Interior Alaska. Phyl lagged 10-15 meters behind the rest as they foraged and when they paused, she sat down. Jacques followed close upon the heels of his parents and thus ate the bulk of the insects. Periodically, Millie carried a dragonfly back to Phyl and she ate (pictured below). We don't know whether these tidbits provided sufficient nourishment for her needs, but later Jacques, Phyl and their parents shared a hearty supper of fresh duckling provided by Roy (another duck feast was described in the previous blogpost) before all repaired to cat-tail point. As the the colts reached cattail point, Jacques pecked very gently at Millie's shoulder; she sat down in the tall grass, and the colts slipped under her wings. Phyl was lifeless in the morning.The events reminded us of behavior we saw in 2004 on the day before the colt named Woodstock died. The twin colts were 2.5 months old. On Woodstock's next-to-last day, he often huddled on the ground with head under wing. At least once, Peter Pan, the stronger colt, went over to Woodstock, settled down next to him, and spent many minutes looking at his twin, as seen in the picture below. After Woodstock's death, our notes show that the parents carefully examined the corpse, but we do not have extended observations like those for Phyl's death in 2009. We saw no agonistic displays or fighting between healthy and failing colts in 2004 or 2009. Phyl's death profoundly affected the behavior of Millie and Roy. It evoked memories of the poignant PBS Nature depictions of an obsessive female chimpanzee who carried the corpse of her deceased infant for many days. Unusual behaviors associated with death have been reported for many species, including primates¹ and elephants².

[See also the Comment below from Roger Payne, who describes the behavior of two helper whales when another whale is ill or dying. As to what emotion underlies such behavior, Roger prudently notes: "I think that the only answer is that we still don't know what emotions species experience..."]

We can't put ourselves inside the head of another species, but we do recognize that behavior is strongly influenced by emotions. The cranes' behavior on July 2^nd indisputably reflected their distressed emotional state. Repeatedly, Roy and Millie interrupted their foraging to return to the cattail point and linger near the body in what we term a "visitation". At the end of the day, all three cranes danced with fierce intensity.

Five minutes after the family had begun their first morning dragonfly safari, Roy returned alone to cattail point to stand next to Phyl. Once there, he craned his neck and peered at the fluffy corpse for about five minutes. He appeared to offer an insect to the ground; then he rejoined the hunt in the deep grass. Six minutes later, all three cranes stopped insect harvesting and came back to the body. Roy and Jacques stayed briefly but Millie spent 28 minutes preening.

Were these visitations merely to check Phyl's status? Perhaps they were waiting for Phyl to revive? There was no hint of scavenging after Phyl died. During the many visitations, no behavior toward Phyl's body remotely resembled the savagery evident while the duckling corpse was being decimated on the previous evening.

As reported by Eugenia Bragina in a comment below, Siberian Crane parents were attentive to the corpses of colts at the Oka Crane Breeding Center. In 2004, Roy, Millie, and Peter Pan stood quietly near's Woodstock's body after he died. The emotion behind such behaviors may be an avian version of worry or of grief.

Roy visited cattail point briefly three more times (2, 7, and 15 minutes) in the morning, sometimes uttering low vocalizations that were just audible to us one hundred meters away. Shortly after he rejoined the others in foraging, it became Millie's turn to visit cattail point. She preened, walked around the body, examined it closely, and bent down so that the underside of her beak was close to the inert mass of feathers. She made two more visitations (2 and 7 minutes). At noon, the whole family walked over to the roost site. In the picture above, the adults are preening. Phyl's body is in the grass to Jacques' left.

In the early afternoon, the family hunted. At 3:15 PM, Roy spent 45 minutes in Phyl's vicinity, looking, preening, stepping around the body, and then somewhat curiously, going through ritualized slow head movements: turning left, bending down and picking up something (perhaps a piece of grass, a twig or blade of cattail), and then turning right, bending down, and apparently dropping the object. The motor pattern was indistinguishable from nest building that we have watched each May. He repeated the sequence as if he was starting to make a pile of grass beside the body. Roy shifted slightly to one side and made another "pile" in a new place. In the picture below, Phyl's body is in the lower right corner. Millie is bending down in a typical nest building stance and she holds a brownish bit of cattail blade in her beak.
In her Master's thesis written over thirty years ago, Karen Voss described repetitive ritualized placement of twigs and grass when Greater Sandhill Cranes built their nests in Wisconsin. She also observed ritualized nest-building in 6-month-old cranes, even though these young birds had no actual nest site.³ But for this July 2 episode, we haven't see ritualized nest building except in early May.

There were more visitations in late afternoon and early evening. Four more times, Millie or Roy initiated grass-piling bouts. In three cases, the pile, had it been visible, would be located beside the body and once on the body itself. Just before roosting time, all three cranes walked to bog central and foraged.

The sun was sinking behind the west ridge, creating long shadows like that produced by Roy's neck (above) and broad bright and dull stripes across the grass (below).

At 9:52 PM, Roy stepped into a stripe of sunlight, jumped, and the whole family began to dance explosively. They danced and danced and danced on the dramatically side-lit grassy stage. Even Jacques, barely three weeks old, joined in with gusto. Fortuitously, Christy's cameras were focused on bog central when the dance erupted for three minutes and 107 photographs. After the dance coda, Roy walked forward into shadow and stood for a minute or more. Then all three cranes returned to roost at cattail point. Roy slept standing on one leg; Millie settled down next to Phyl's body, and Jacques climbed under her wing. For more images go to Christy Yuncker Photo Journal.
The memorable dance was neither frenetic nor flailing. It was extended in duration, intense, and very fast, but the moves were controlled, fluid, graceful, and balanced. Each bird exhibited with high energy, and yet all three were attuned. The photo above shows Roy as he dashed from the right in front of Millie who is at the apex of a spectacular high jump with wings straight out. As she landed, Roy wheeled to face her and bowed in a forward display (see Quicktime movie below). Then he spread his wings, jumped, and turned left to engage Jacques in a upright spread-wing face-off. The movie below shows a 4 second segment of the overall dance that lasted 160 seconds. See also the link to our Photo Gallery.



The intensity and duration of the dancing after the death of Phyl strongly suggests that dancing provides emotional release for cranes. It is widely recognized that dancing strengthens and reaffirms the pair-bond, and in this instance, dancing reinforced family solidarity and and promoted continuity.

All summer from May into August, Roy replaces his flight feathers, one-by-one. During the vigorous dancing, several old feathers fell out and floated to the grass. The photo below was taken just after the finale of the solidarity dance. Roy is walking toward us. A loose whitish primary feather that is dropping from his left wing has been highlighted by the sunlight.
In the days since, Roy and Millie carry on as characteristically attentive crane parents, feeding and guarding Jacques as they guide his progress through core subjects of Foraging and Display/Dance.

When we first posted this blog, it had been a week since Phyl died. We saw no dancing during that entire week. We monitored the pond all day; Phyl's body was not scavenged nor did the crane family returned to cattail point. After July 2, the cranes began to roost 50 meters to the east.

The photo to the right shows Phyl's skeletonized corpse on August 10 - 6 weeks after her death. Insects and bacteria have cleaned away flesh, but the body is still not scavenged.

For us, July 2 is unforgettable - repeated visitations to Phyl's corpse climaxed by the Dance of Solidarity.

There are so many aspects of such behavior that need further study and explanation. For example, what is the adaptive significance of the ritualized grass-piling behavior?

1. For re-nesting? The grass-piling could be tentative restarting of nest-building in response to death of an offspring. In this context, "death of a colt" (reproductive failure) leads cranes to initiate another reproductive cycle. When eggs fail to hatch, a second nesting is common at lower latitudes where summer seasons are longer than Alaska.
   
2. For concealing the body? The grass-piling might be like a motor behavior module, a sequence of postures and movements driven by neural circuitry (a fixed-action pattern in classical ethology). Such a piling module could be used to build a nest or to hide a corpse that might otherwise atttract predators to the nest territory.
3. For grieving? Piling could be part of animal version of grieving behavior. Marc Bekoff has reported similar "funeral" incidents, in magpies (standing vigil for several minutes and piling grasses near a dead magpie at the side of a road)⁴ and in a fox (piling dirt on the corpse of a fox killed by a cougar).⁵ Perhaps ritualized piling behavior has deep evolutionary roots and is somehow hard-wired in the nervous systems of birds and mammals?
4. Merely a general expression of stress? In ethological terminology, piling might be displacement behavior, as suggested by the comment below from Eugenia Bragina. George Archibald notes below that cranes dance when they are upset by some event, such as the approach of a predator. Perhaps grass-piling and the intense dance simply reflect emotional stress.
   

Emotions like grief have physiological bases. In humans, grief behaviors include lethargy, subdued responsiveness, and bouts of wild emotional release. When medical researchers image the brains of people in bereavement, they see localized brain centers light-up in MRI scans and proinflammatory cytokines increase as well.^6,7 Since both birds and mammals descended from reptiles, their brains have similar basic architectures, but the evolution of cognitive brain centers followed different trajectories. Facile generalization from human data to bird neuroscience is not legitimate since the higher cognitive centers are not homologous. But from a behavioral perspective, the visitation bouts and solidarity dancing in cranes show parallels with human grieving - in some senses, reminiscent of an Irish wake. Putative similarities in physiological correlates, such as inflammation and activation of brain nuclei, are intriguing starting points for further comparative research.
In the words of Peter Marler⁸:

"...emotion-based displays can of course convey a lot of information."

We suspect that both emotional and cognitive factors contributed to the displays and other behaviors we witnessed after the death of Phyl.

We welcome your reactions to our blog. If you have relevant interpretations or observations that you are willing to share with others, either click on the word "Comment" at the bottom of this blog or email us directly. With your permission, we will paste your email as a Comment below.

References cited:
1. Citations in LiveScience column entitled "Grief: the price of love" by Meridith F. Small.
2. Citations on Elephant information website.
3. Voss KS 1976. Behavior of the greater sandhill crane. Thesis for Master of Science in Zoology, University of Wisconsin-Madison.
4. Bekoff M. 2007. Are you feeling what I'm feeling? New Scientist. 26 May 2007, p. 44 (Grief).
5. Bekoff M. 2009. A fox, a cougar, and a funeral. Psychology Today blog
6. O'Connor MF, Irwin MR, Wellisch DK 2009. When grief heats up: Pro-inflammatory cytokines predict regional brain activation. Neuroimage May 29 Epub.
7. O'Connor MF, Wellisch DK, Stanton AL, Eisenberger NI, Irwin MR, Lieberman MD, 2008. Craving love? Enduring grief activates brain's reward center. Neuroimage 42:969-72.
8. Marler P 2004. Bird songs: a cornucopia for communication. In Nature's Music: The Science of Bird Song, P. Marler & H Slabbenkoorn (eds.),132-177. Elsevier, Amsterdam, p. 172.

Revised July 31, 2009

Alaska Crane Kindergarten

---For photos on the Christy Yuncker Photo Journal webpage, click here.

Sandhill Crane colts are intensively tutored from day 1. For their parents, summer school teaching is a 24/7 job. The three core subjects (crane versions of the three R's) in Colt School are: Foraging, Display/Dance, and Flying, each of which addresses biological imperatives: nourishment, socialization, and migration. We think of the 14 days after hatching to be crane kindergarten, when the curriculum stresses Foraging first and Display/Dance next.

Crane colts run about on the day they hatch; they are physiologically precocial. Body plan, brain anatomy, and motor abilities are genetic, encoded in their DNA just as for every crane generation over 10 million years. Yet colts don't scatter like a brood of leghorn chicks for they are far from self-sufficient.

Young colts require parental protection and instruction for many months; effectively they are behaviorally altricial. For cranes as for people, nature enables and nurture refines. The genetic program provides only a framework that roughly defines capacity and potential. On hatch day in mid-June in Alaska, colt schooling begins to shape and expand the native talents.

Foraging: Life is especially fragile in the first week. As the colts struggle to cope with the sensory storm in the bright new world outside the egg, they learn not only to avoid predators but also to distinguish food from pebbles and sticks. From hatch day forwards, parents devote most of their days to searching for suitable food items and offering them to the hungry colts, as illustrated by 10-day old Phyl accepting food from Millie in the picture below.

Food items may be frightening or the packaging formidable. To the right, Roy has caught a dragonfly that he offered to 3-day old Jacques. The colt looked baffled. Next, Roy dismembered the insect and successively fed the isolated head (a neat package), the thorax and the abdomen. Jacques was more interested in the next dragonfly presented to him. Perhaps the most impressive meal of this season was a dead ducking. This ungainly package of protein frightened even Millie at first. But Roy picked the duckling up by the neck (photo below) and then shook repeatedly until he could extract small bits of flesh that he passed to each colt.
For at least 14 hours each day during the first week after hatch, Roy and Millie scoured the grass for insects. At seven days of age, both colts were thriving. By ten days of age, they were beginning to peck at morsels on the ground, although most of their nourishment came via parent's beak.They had transformed from bumbling stumbling little butterballs to full partnership in the foraging foursome at twelve days of age, as shown at the end of this blogpost.

Displaying/Dancing: Many scholarly publications emphasize the easily-viewed aggressive encounters in mobs of cranes at staging and roosting areas. These flashy in-your-face displays often involve 1-2 year old birds that are probably pre-reproductive. Similar postures are used by older birds to defend nest territory. But agonistic signals are only one chapter in the display/dance lexicon. Amid the the crush of adolescent face-offs on the Platte River shallows during the annual "March Melee," mated pairs of cranes dance in synchrony with one another, like teen-age lovers oblivious of the hubub in the surrounding crowd on New Year's eve in Times Square.

Crane dancing often involves a mated pair, but cranes dance solo as well. Dancing generally reflects  a positive emotional state.  In the June 11, 2009 blogpost, we described Roy's joyous dance upon return from migration; this was largely a solo performance but also involved Millie as she dashed across the ice. Another example is shown to the right - Roy dancing alone in early evening at the center of the marsh on colt day seven (2009). It was his first dance since hatch days. He jumped and ran while Millie nestled, thirty meters away, with sleeping colts under her wings (see hyperlink for image). It is tempting to think that Roy's dance expressed elation: after an exhausting first week of non-stop parenting, both colts had survived and were healthy.  Dancing of a pair promotes reproductive synchrony. The dancing of Roy, Millie, and Jacques after the death of Phyl effectively promoted family solidarity and provided emotional release (blogpost of July 10, 2009)

In some cases, we may not see dancing for weeks. In 2009, Roy did not dance during incubation yet he danced briefly alone (spontaneously) on the evening of June 10, the hatch day of Jacques and again on June 11, the hatch day of Phyl. In 2008, we observed no dancing by Roy in late July or through August, during the 6 weeks while his colt recovered from an injury, but then Roy began to dance again when the colt finally began to fly (see hyperlink and May 20, 2009 blogpost). 

Displays and dances are communications. Crane displays involve posture, movement, timing, and context. In order for us to understand fully the displays of cranes, we need to construct a catalog of the complex moves and try to asses their meanings from the worldview of a crane. Body language, loud calling (long distance), and soft purring (short distance) are the channels for the social messaging networks of cranes. Displays can deliver information with a single unambiguous posture (leaning forward as a signal to fly or jumping back when startled), or with sequences linking several dance steps (jumping and turning), or through a series of multi-step sequences flowing together and lasting for seconds or even minutes.

Dancing is a spectacular distinguishing behavior of cranes. As noted by Ellis and his coworkers, the rich repertoire of stereotyped displays and postures puts cranes at one apex of social complexity in the animal world¹.

A display can be a a single statement or a part of a conversation. Dance is not just an announcement of territory or of mood, but also allows two-way information exchange. Just as bird music is divisible into notes, phrases and full songs, so crane dancing is divisible into steps, sequences, and full dances. For a mated pair, dance sequences are complementary and responsive to the partner. Dance is an important cement for crane social structure, and dance proficiency requires years of practice.

There are parallels between dancing and bird song. The full adult song of many passerine birds depends not only upon innate ability but also learning. The "song system" has been extensively studied². The sequence is listening, storage, retrieval, early motor output, and then practicing and practicing until the full adult song crystallizes. Young 3-month-old birds listen to songs of experienced adults and store those memories in a precisely localized brain nucleus. It is only later at 7 months of age, that they begin to sing under the control of another nucleus in their brains. The first attempts are choppy but with time and practice, young birds become good enough to mimic the songs heard 4 months earlier. Thus song output is initiated and refined at one site in the brain that draw upon memories stored in another site.

Cranes are born with the capacity for dance but early attempts are halting. Anatomy and neurocircuitry allow dance postures and movements, but for cranes as for the Bolshoi ballet, repetition helps movements appear to be effortless and the sequencing to become liquid. For a colt, we see a three step lesson-plan for display/dance training: 1) motivation by adult and observation by colt, 2) imitation, and 3) complementary response to adult steps. Display training for crane colts can begin as early as day 4. Just before the photo on the left was taken, Roy and Millie gave little jumps that caused both colts to watch  in rapt attention. Then tiny Jacques (colt in the middle right, above) faced off to Roy in a forward display . As Roy stretched out both his wings, Jacques

mimicked his father with his own tiny wing stretch (left image above). The enlargement to the right lets you see the little guy better. During kindergarten, dance training stops at imitation, step 2 of the lesson-plan.

Only this year, we discovered that colts display with one another. The picture to the left shows Roy probing for food while Jacques and Phyl (4 days old) face off to one another. Jacques is jumping in a baby wing stretch directed toward Phyl. It is possible that this baby display is a baby face-off - precursor of the behaviors of teenagers jumping on the shallows of the Platte.

Graduation from kindergarten is marked by efficient family team foraging. The "four gunslingers" in the photograph below are a formidable sweeping machine for harvesting dragonflies. Twelve-day old colts move smoothly as they flap their front appendages (wings) and run between their parents. In the coming weeks, the colt-parent pairs will forage together on the home marsh. In addition, the family will begin exploratory day-trips to adjoining bogs. Except for physical conditioning during foraging and dance training, flight school lies a month ahead.


References cited
1. Ellis DH, Swengel SR, Archibald GW, Kepler Cb 1998. A sociogram for cranes of the world. Behavioral Processes 43:123-151.
2. Marler P 2004, Slabbenkoorn H (eds.)2004. Nature's Music: The Science of Bird Song, Elsevier, Amsterdam.
Revised July 12, 2009

Jacques and Phyl hatch on June 10-11

---For photos on the Christy Yuncker Photo Journal webpage, click here.

Our 2009 spring snowfall was heavy; the Fairbanks cross-country ski season lasted into mid-April. Last year's grasses and cranberry bushes are poking above the shrinking snow cover on April 29 as a pair of sandhill cranes drops through the gentle light of early evening onto our Goldstream Valley pond. The signal skin atop their heads is turgid with blood; each bird sports a crimson helmet. They join in unison calls, his pulsating and hers a double note.

Roy dances at 11 PM in the fading light that renders him monochromatic. Dark, severe, silhouetted against the rough gray ice.

One or two primary feathers are missing on Roy's left wing, showing that cranes replace their flight feathers one-by-one, even during a migration. Apparently the demands of nesting and fledging in the short summer season at 65 degrees North allow no flightless "down time" when all feathers could be regrown simultaneously (see Rowher link).

Roy vocalizes as he spins -- crouching, turning, wings outstretched, jumping, wings folded tight to his body, like an avian Baryshnikov dervish, whirling on an empty stage. Joy! Rapture! Triumph! Home again! Relief!

Millie darts past him as he dances solo, focused. Two hundred and thirty days and over seven thousand miles since he flew south from this place with Millie and Oblio (see previous post) on a bright September morning. The Quicktime movie below shows his tour jete and for more of this dance, see Christy Yuncker Photo Journal.

Gulls harassed the crane pair as they settled in. Other crane couples and single intruders threatened the territory but Roy and Millie held firm.

The pair meticulously inspected the bog for a week. Repeatedly, Roy picked up grasses and twigs (below, left) and gently initiated nest building but Millie vacillated. They mated several times.

Then on May 9, though a narrow opening between spruce trees, far across the cranberry bog, we saw Millie sitting in tall grass (above, right). Tedious incubation duties alternated every 3-6 hours for 30 days, with Roy's shifts tending to be longer. He did not dance throughout incubation, but during respites off the nest, he frequently called. When a crane answered from across the valley, Roy flew toward the response and was absent for a few hours.

On at least two occasions a strange crane landed on the bog while Roy was absent. Millie came off the nest, calling as she confronted the new crane. Roy reappeared quickly, flying from across the valley and landing with legs forward in kicking-attack mode directed toward the interloper on the far right in the picture. The intruder flew away immediately and unison calls followed.

Neither crane left the nest vicinity on June 9 or 10. On the evening of the 10th, Roy walked from the nest area to the center of the bog, fed briefly, and broke into by a short energetic dance. He repeated the performance early next morning.

Minutes later, we spied the heads of two minuscule crane colts, barely visible as they stumbled through the sedges and cottongrass, waving their stumpy wings. The family of four now prospects for food among pinkish low-bush cranberry blossoms and white laborador tea. After a sedentary month, the adults have become harvesters, seizing juicy caterpillars and adult dragonflies and even birds (see next post) that can be dismembered and brandished gently to the vocal colts we named Jacques and Phyl.

Crane parents compensate

---For photos on the Christy Yuncker Photo Journal webpage, click here.

Each colt is an individual. If a colt is injured, adults can compensate and delay their migration - apparently waiting for the colt to become flight-competent. We saw such compensation in 2008.

By 18 days of age, Oblio-08 was
running about waving her tiny wings in tandem with Roy (pictured to the right). But in early July, she began to favor her right leg, suggesting an injury. Although she continued to grow, for some weeks Oblio rarely ran and did not dance, jump or bound; the basics of colt education and physical conditioning were postponed.

Millie and Roy (the parents) were attentive, protective and frequently offered food. Yet Oblio seemed solitary, foraging 20-30 meters from her parents. (For photos, see Christy Yuncker Photo Journal) In contrast to other years, Roy and Millie danced little with each other and not at all with Oblio, perhaps reflecting their emotional state?

As the leg slowly healed, Oblio began to run a little and to flap her wings in mid-August. Roy and Millie ran with her and then gave flight demos around the pond. As shown on Christy Yuncker Photo Journal, Oblio managed to lift off on August 26 at 74 days of age - two weeks late. Over ensuing days, Oblio tried several short flights around the pond. She gained competence and confidence.

On the morning of August 31, Roy and Millie spent hours purring, as if coaxing Oblio to fly. Finally, after several abortive attempts, all three lifted off. Oblio flew with her right leg hanging down, but they cleared the trees and disappeared across the valley. Three hours later, the cranes returned; the rest of the day was spent in preening and feeding.

Dancing became a staple activity of the family. Millie, Roy, and Oblio spent the next ten days feeding (every two hours) and dancing as a group of three - the first dances we had seen for over a month. Several times each day, the family flew off for an hour and then returned. At first, Oblio rested in the grass after these flights. At night, the family roosted across the valley (2-3 km distant).

Early September weather was mild and with each day, Oblio grew stronger. By September 10th, she was able to keep up with her parents (see Christy Yuncker Photo Journal).

On the morning of September 11, bouts of feeding and preening alternated every hour. At 11:05 AM, the three flew off to the south, then turned west down the valley and disappeared, departing (we hope) on their migration south. Departure had been delayed for almost two weeks while Oblio gained strength, yet the timing was auspicious since the first serious frost occurred only four days later.

Yumin Guo has described similar parental solicitude in response to injury of a hooded crane colt.

The origins of the Alaska Sandhill Crane blog

This blog and the complementary webpage, Christy Yuncker Photo Journal, developed from our fascination with a pair of Sandhill Cranes who return each summer to Alaska. For the past several years, they have nested on a cranberry bog in Goldstream Valley, a few miles north of Fairbanks. Cranes are migratory, coming to Alaska only for the summer months. John Wright, a wildlife biologist for the state of Alaska, has tracked a banded crane from Fairbanks for 3100 miles, to stop-over sites on the Platte River in Nebraska and finally to a wintering site near Snyder, Texas.

We refer to our crane pair as Millie and Roy. Over 14 seasons, we have watched cranes arrive in late April/early May, court one another with calls and dances, mate and nest, feed and educate their colts (young cranes), communicate with neighboring cranes in the valley, and leave in early September for the long southward migration.

The summer season in Interior Alaska is barely long enough for the crane reproductive cycle. When the adults first drop from the sky to the surface of the bog, snow covers the grasses and cattails and the open pond is solid ice. As incubation starts in the second week of May, the ice gradually darkens and then melts during daylight but often reforms when darkness falls. The weeks pass quickly as the adults raise their colt(s) and teach motor and social skills. In most years, young colts first lift off the bog in mid-August and then must practice hard to become airworthy in time for migration at the end of the month.

We learn first-hand from watching, listening, photographing, recording, and then contemplating. When we tinker with Nature, we affect not only other species but also ourselves.

As you read this blog and look at our webpage, we hope that you will share your own observations and offer interpretations for all readers to consider.

Please post your comments directly on this blog, or email them to ghapp@uvm.edu. We are particularly interested in the education of the colts and in the cross-talk among cranes within a neighborhood. Our goal is a better appreciation of the "world view'" from a crane's perspective, with hopes that better cross-species understanding can promote crane welfare.