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Scientists Look To Create More Habitat For State Threatened Sandhill Crane

Sarah Bohannon
/
NSPR
John Gilardi looks for crane roosts off of Aguas Frias Road between Durham and Richvale in Butte County.

Imagine – you have a tradition of traveling with your family every winter. Wherever you travel, it’s a place that’s imprinted in your mind. Your family has been visiting there since as early as you can remember. But this year, when you and yours arrive at your destination, the place you usually call your winter home isn’t there. It no longer exists. While that may seem exaggerated, it’s something a state threatened bird faces each year when it returns to spend winter in California’s Central Valley.

Greater Sandhill Cranes are large birds. They have long legs and a long neck. They’re bodies are covered in gray feathers, except for the small crimson-red patch that surrounds their eyes and forehead.

A migratory bird, Greater Sandhill Cranes spend their springs breeding as far north as Washington. In the winter they fly south going as far down as the Delta. They’ve been coming to the region’s Central Valley for ages – back when it was still wetlands. Now only 10 percent of that natural habitat still exists.  

Credit Sarah Bohannon
Sandhill Cranes still standing in their water-covered nighttime roost early in the morning at Staten Island, near Walnut Grove.

Greg Golet is a senior ecologist with the Nature Conservancy who’s currently studying these birds – largely in the North State. He said even though there’s only a small amount of that wetland habitat left, the cranes keep returning to where it used to be. Coincidentally those ancestral stomping grounds have mostly been replaced with crops – many which can be used by the cranes to forage and rest. Golet’s study is looking into ways to preserve this crane/ag set up. 

“We’re trying to set up a network for them where they can have access to the fields that have the leftover grain in them and to do that you have to have a roost site – a good spot for them to spend the night basically – that’s really close by,” Golet said.

You see, Greater Sandhill Cranes are pretty picky when it comes to where they’ll eat and sleep. They require a dry place to forage for food in the day. But at night, they need a place that’s covered in water. They sleep standing up in it, using the water as a sort of alarm system that alerts them to oncoming predators. Basically, if a bobcat or coyote enters the water, the birds will either feel it via the water’s vibrations or they’ll hear the predator splashing, giving them a chance to fly away.

They also need their dry day and wet night locations to be in close proximity to each other because they’ll only fly about three miles between the two to forage and sleep.

But just how finicky these birds really are is up for debate, and is really the biggest question Golet and his team are trying to figure out. If they turn out to be less picky than currently thought, then there’s a chance the scientists could not only help preserve their existing habitat, but also possibly create even more.

John Gilardi is one of these scientists. He spends a lot of his time looking for cranes through his telescope. Mostly he’s looking for where birds are roosting – and whether or not it’s where they’ve roosted in the past. But he also works with roosts the scientists have created by hiring farmers to flood their fields.

“We put decoys out and see if birds actually start roosting there, and they have in fact at three of the four we’ve done,” he said.

Credit Sarah Bohannon / NSPR
/
NSPR
Sandhill Cranes flying to find foraging grounds early in the morning at Staten Island, near Walnut Grove.

Although data is still being collected – the presence of any cranes at these sites seems to be a good sign.  

“If we can set up roost sites and are successful attracting them to these roosts sites then we have some certainty that we’ll be able to provide habitat for them even if it’s not available maybe at the exact spot that they’re used to returning to,” Golet said.  

But it’s much better than having no winter home to return to at all.