WOODS, WATERS, AND WILDLIFE
COMEBACK
CRANE
Sandhills, common in the western and southern U.S., are on the rise in the Buckeye State. STORY AND PHOTOS BY W.H. “CHIP” GROSS
S
tanding 4 feet tall with a wingspan up to 7 feet, sandhill cranes are hard to miss. To make identification even easier, adults sport the colors of a certain prominent college football team: scarlet and gray. Young cranes, known as colts, begin life as little balls of golden-brown fluff. Unfortunately, there are relatively few of these birds in Ohio. So few, in fact, they’re considered a state-threatened
14 OHIO COOPERATIVE LIVING • SEPTEMBER 2019
species. That’s not the case nationally, as sandhill cranes are so numerous in some southern states and many states west of the Mississippi, they’re considered game birds, with hunting seasons set annually. The good news is that the population of sandhill cranes in Ohio has increased in recent years. “Sandhill’s a wetland-dependent species, and its numbers were low for a long time in the Great Lakes region and eastern U.S.,” says Laura Kearns, a wildlife biologist with the Ohio Division of Wildlife. “But with protection from unregulated hunting, coupled with wetlands protection and restoration, they have been gradually increasing since the mid-1900s. Populations in neighboring states and