Monte Vista
Other than having to keep a supply of windshield washer fluid handy, the folks here are absolutely thrilled when their friends come back, winging their way north in the spring and now, in the majesty of a Rocky Mountain autumn, heading south. And always stopping to visit.
They are sandhill cranes, nearly the entire Rocky Mountain population of some 18,000 of the giant birds landing in the fields and marshes of the Monte Vista National Wildlife Refuge. The birds eat frantically and then continue on to their wintering grounds.
Next Tuesday and Wednesday, the town will celebrate with an autumn crane festival. Other than the chamber of commerce, no one is more excited than Kelli Stone, biologist at the San Luis Valley refuge, who grew up along busy Sheridan Boulevard in Denver. Today, the only traffic and honking Stone experiences is when noisy Canada geese converge on a marsh pond at the same time as ducks or cranes.
“We always went camping, and I knew pretty early that wild things and wild places was where my heart was,” she said.
Six years ago, Stone, 39, became the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologist for one of the three San Luis Valley refuges – the others are Baca and Alamosa – which comprise some 120,000 acres of pristine land harboring everything from eagles to deer and elk.
But the greater sandhill cranes are Stone’s passion.
The birds, more than 4 feet tall with a wingspan of 5 feet, are not newcomers to the valley. Nearby petroglyphs show the unmistakable image of sand hill cranes. The rock drawings are 2,000 years old.
The birds’ lives are long – they can live to be 30 – and fascinating. And when it comes to raising their young, it can also be a bit unsettling.
“They lay two eggs but rarely raise both,” Stone said. “One hatches and the parents spend a lot of time tending to it. The second young is just insurance. If something happens to the first, they switch their parental care to the second. But almost all of the time, they let the second one starve to death. Or they let the older one kill it.”
Many of the sandhills are on their way to wintering grounds in Mexico. Thousands of others winter at New Mexico’s Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge. Some won’t make it to either. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service says 528 sandhill cranes were legally shot by hunters during the 2003-04 season in the Western states, including Colorado.
The thousands that began arriving last week will move on by the end of October. Until then, the dirt road snaking through the refuge allows visitors to see the remarkable birds, sometimes up close.
“Because they’re not hunted on the refuge, they’re not afraid of people,” Stone said. “There will be 15,000 or more cranes here. It’s a phenomenal sight.”
What visitors will not see are endangered whooping cranes. There are only about 280 left, all in the central and eastern flyways. For more than two decades, a few whoopers mingled with the sandhills – the result of an experiment that failed.
“Because cranes lay two eggs but just raise one, biologists took the second whooping crane egg from their nesting areas in Gray’s Lake, Idaho,” Stone said. “Those eggs were put into sandhill crane nests as the primary egg, and the young whoopers were raised by the sandhills as their own.”
The program, started in 1975, produced 40 of the much larger white whooping cranes.
“When I arrived in 1999, there were just four whooping cranes left in our Rocky Mountain population,” Stone said. “The last one died in 2003. The program was stopped.”
The failure reflects a harsh reality of nature.
“The whooping cranes raised by sandhills thought they were sandhills,” Stone said. “The parents didn’t recognize them as whoopers, and the whoopers didn’t recognize themselves as whoopers. But because they’re genetically designed not to interbreed, when it was time to choose a mate, the whooping cranes were never chosen as partners by the sandhills. And the whooping cranes never seemed to find each other, either. They stayed alone until they died.”
Rich Tosches writes each Wednesday and Sunday. He can be reached at rtosches@denverpost.com.
