Larch Creek Birds

What the birds (and frogs) are saying at a creek in western Washington
Plate 44
Sandhill Crane
John James Audubon, betw
Bird

Sandhill Crane

Antigone canadensis
Cranes (Gruidae)
New for the creekHeading out
Summer visitor. Expected here roughly Mar to May. Moving on: expectation falls from 57% now to 31% a month from now.
Field marks
A tall grey crane with a bare red forehead, long black legs and a bustle of drooping feathers over the tail. Flies with the neck straight out like a javelin; herons tuck theirs in.
Male & female
Males and females look alike; males average slightly larger.
Voice
A loud, rolling, bugling rattle that carries over a mile, often from flocks so high overhead that you hear them for a full minute before you find them.
Diet
Grain, tubers, insects, frogs, mice; probes and gleans in fields and marshes.
Habitat
Marshes, wet meadows and farmland. Most cranes over Puget Sound are commuters on the way to or from California.
Nesting
A mound of marsh vegetation; two eggs. The chicks, called colts, walk within hours and look like a bath mat that has decided to have a go at life.
Size
About 4 ft tall, a 6½-ft wingspan and 7–11 lb: the height of a first-grader and the weight of a bowling ball, if the bowling ball could fly and insisted on announcing it.

Their flyway over the lowlands peaks in spring and again in September–October, so an autumn flock calling overhead is almost certainly heading south.

Season how expected it is here, week by week

50%100%JanFebMarAprMayJunJulAugSepOctNovDecheard at the creektoday
Fig. 1. BirdNET's range model for this location: the chance this species is present in each week of the year. Orange ticks mark weeks it has actually been heard at the creek; the dashed line is today.

At the creek 3 calls on 1 day, first Oct 31, last Oct 31

0100:00 — 1 calls001:00 — 0 calls02:00 — 0 calls03:00 — 0 calls304:00 — 0 calls05:00 — 0 calls06:00 — 0 calls607:00 — 0 calls08:00 — 0 calls09:00 — 0 calls910:00 — 0 calls11:00 — 0 calls12:00 — 0 calls1213:00 — 0 calls14:00 — 1 calls15:00 — 1 calls1516:00 — 0 calls17:00 — 0 calls18:00 — 0 calls1819:00 — 0 calls20:00 — 0 calls21:00 — 0 calls2122:00 — 0 calls23:00 — 0 callssunrisesunset
Fig. 2. When it calls: all detections by hour of day (today's sunrise and sunset shown).
23Oct 2 — 0 callsOct 3 — 0 callsOct 3Oct 4 — 0 callsOct 5 — 0 callsOct 6 — 0 callsOct 7 — 0 callsOct 8 — 0 callsOct 9 — 0 callsOct 10 — 0 callsOct 10Oct 11 — 0 callsOct 12 — 0 callsOct 13 — 0 callsOct 14 — 0 callsOct 15 — 0 callsOct 16 — 0 callsOct 17 — 0 callsOct 17Oct 18 — 0 callsOct 19 — 0 callsOct 20 — 0 callsOct 21 — 0 callsOct 22 — 0 callsOct 23 — 0 callsOct 24 — 0 callsOct 24Oct 25 — 0 callsOct 26 — 0 callsOct 27 — 0 callsOct 28 — 0 callsOct 29 — 0 callsOct 30 — 0 callsOct 31 — 3 callsOct 31
Fig. 3. Calls per day over the last 30 days.

Recordings

Clearest recording · Oct 31 12:29 am · 85% sure
spectrogram

From the encyclopedia

The sandhill crane is a species of large crane of North America and extreme northeastern Siberia. The common name of this bird refers to its habitat, such as the Platte River, on the edge of Nebraska's Sandhills on the American Great Plains. Sandhill cranes are known to frequent the edges of bodies of water. The central Platte River Valley in Nebraska is the most important stopover area for the nominotypical subspecies, the lesser sandhill crane (A. c. canadensis), with up to 450,000 of these birds migrating through annually.
From Wikipedia, "Sandhill crane", CC BY-SA 4.0.