2/03/12 SPRING WILL BE EARLY (IF IT ISN'T LATE), AND CRANES ARE PART OF MY PSYCHE

NATIVE PUSSY WILLOWS BUDS ARE BEGINNING TO OPEN

SANDHILL CRANE (WEB PHOTO)

Friday, 8:00 AM.  33 degrees, wind W, calm.  The sky is overcast and the barometer predicts fair weather.  The weather we have had this winter is very reminiscent of the winters where we lived in New York.
        Yesterday was again an unusually warm day, with temperatures reaching into the low forties Fahrenheit.  A local groundhog would have had a tough time predicting winter as the cloud cover was quite changeable. 
        Helping out the groundhog, Buddy and I went to the beach to look for signs of an early spring.  We saw two anglers wading in the lake surf fishing, certainly a very early sign of something or other.  However neither had caught anything, so I will not give their presence much predictive credence. Buddy himself is a predictor of sorts; he is copiously shedding his winter coat and I am bushing him daily. A more certain indicator of an early spring were opening buds of the native pussy willows (Salix discolor).  They were just starting to open, and I cut some and Joan put them in a vase, where they look like they will open fully in a few days in the house.  I guess the pussy willows are hedging their bets, not fully open but ready to go.  In conclusion, Buddy and I predict spring will be early this year. If it isn’t late.
        A Wisconsin lawmaker has proposed a bill to have a hunting season for Sandhill cranes, a species iconic of wildness.  Their flocks are evidently damaging crops in the southern part of the state, and a number of states now have a crane hunting season.  While goose hunting in southern Wisconsin last fall we saw and heard almost as many cranes as geese, so I don’t believe they are endangered in any way.  Normally I would say that it is logical that a species that becomes too numerous should be controlled by hunting, but I cannot be completely rational in the case of cranes.
        For one thing, in my youth cranes were a rare sight in Wisconsin, and were much lauded as a symbol of all that is wild.  Aldo Leopold’s Marshland Elegy, an almost poetic paean to the Sandhill crane, was a centerpiece of my early conservation education.  For another, Joan and I  eagerly awaited the spring migration of Sandhill cranes  the years we lived in Nebraska, and seldom missed an opportunity to watch them along the Platte River near Grand Island.  Even now, twenty and more years later, we still detour to the Platte to see them as often as we can when we are traveling in the late winter.  On a more practical note, cranes are so wary that they are extremely difficult to hunt, and it might very well not be worth the effort, although their flesh is called “the rib-eye of the sky.”  On balance, I doubt I will ever shoot a Sandhill crane, they are much too much a part of my psyche.