“The Mud Season” with blustery intermittently blue sky and freezing rain it chases some folks away to warm dry areas, but I like to stay. Why? This is when the big birds come back!

 

Big birds - as big as the human torso - engrossed with courting one another or sitting on eggs in large stick nests. As light cracked on the Elk Refuge at o’dark thirty in the morning, there they were; The sandhill cranes that frequent the foraging area under the radio tower every year. They were just up from their staging ground near Merna, Wyoming where the new natural gas pipeline for Jackson begins at a gas well site. And low and behold, they were dancing. Leaping and calling, legs and wings, necks and beaks, like puppets lifting off the stage as if pulled by invisible strings. Floating with hang-time Michael Jordan would envy. The pair was enamored with one another, fascinated by a ritual far older than humankind as a species - a ritual that is repeated annually in the northern hemisphere, but only during the mud season.

 

As the sky lightens I cannot help but turn my gaze 180 degrees to the west and look up the slope at the 6 foot wide bald eagle nest on the Spring Creek Ranch Property – land that was given to the Land Trust for safe keeping as wildlife habitat and open space. In the past, I have helped band the chicks at that nest. Additionally, I have helped the guests of Spring Creek Ranch and Amangani monitor the nestling’s survival from a far distance atop the Butte, reporting periodic observations to the Wyoming Game and Fish Department.  While walking below that nest with Federal biologists leading the way, we discovered sandhill crane bones. And now, as I look through my spotting scope up at the huge stick nest, I see adult eagle has eggs nestled against her humid breast. The eggs will soon be eagle chicks that will find the sandhill crane pair’s colt (a young crane) excellent fodder in mid-June. Good luck to the Radio Tower sandhill cranes and to the East Gros Ventre bald eagles in the age old life-dance of the big birds.
– Tom Segerstrom