Advertisement
Fun Facts
Did You Know?
Sandhill cranes mate for life, which in crane years means twenty years or more. Pairs form on the wintering grounds, often after extended courtship dances that involve leaping, bowing, wing-spreading, and tossing sticks and grass into the air. The dancing serves a practical bonding purpose, but the visual effect carries a theatrical quality that turned sandhill crane courtship one of the most frequently documented bird behaviors in North America. Two four-foot-tall gray birds leaping into the air and throwing grass at each other in the middle of a rice field tends to stop traffic
If This Animal Could Talk...
"Watch closely, respect my space, and let my habitat explain the rest of the story."
The sandhill crane was alive longer than the idea of North Louisiana. Fossil records put the bird at somewhere around 2.5 million years old, which makes it one of the oldest living bird lineages on the planet. The crane you hear calling over a flooded rice field in Avoyelles Parish in December carries a direct genetic line to a bird that walked the same continent before the last ice age reshaped it. The sandhill crane watched the glaciers come and go, adapted to the aftermath, and kept showing up.
A four-foot-tall, eight-to-twelve-pound bird with a six-to-seven-foot wingspan, the sandhill crane (Antigone canadensis) commands attention by existing. A great blue heron can blend into a marsh. A sandhill crane standing in a harvested rice field in the middle of Avoyelles Parish looks exactly how you'd expect a four-foot-tall gray bird to look in an open field: impossible to miss, even from the highway.
A Few More Facts
How they hunt and forage: The sandhill crane eats everything. Grain, seeds, tubers, roots, berries, insects, crawfish, frogs, snakes, mice, and anything else that fits in the bill and can be swallowed. The bird feeds by walking slowly through agricultural fields and shallow wetlands, probing soil with the bill, flipping debris, and grabbing whatever turns up. A sandhill crane feeding in a harvested rice field in Avoyelles Parish eats waste grain primarily, but if a crawfish shows up, the crawfish was added to the afternoon's intake without hesitation. Winter flocks in North Louisiana feed heavily on waste grain in harvested agricultural fields: rice, corn, sorghum, soybeans. The fields that most people drive past without a second thought amount to an all-you-can-eat buffet for a bird that will eat just about anything off the ground. The sandhill crane treats a harvested rice field the way most people treat a holiday dinner: systematically and without guilt.
Live birth or eggs? no
When young are born: See the detailed species sections below.
Advertisement
Accessibility
Choose stable, publicly accessible viewing areas and use binoculars or a zoom lens when terrain, water, vegetation, or distance limits close observation.
Advertisement
Frequently Asked Questions
Does Sandhill Crane live in North Louisiana?
Yes. The sandhill crane was alive longer than the idea of North Louisiana. In flight, the sandhill crane's silhouette has nothing in common with any heron in North Louisiana immediately. The call comes from a trachea that coils inside the bird's breastbone, a tube over four feet long in adult birds, which gives the call a resonance and volume that no other bird in North Louisiana matches
How do you identify Sandhill Crane?
The bird wears gray. The whole bird. A heavy, even gray that covers the body, the wings, and the neck from base to head. The gray sometimes carries a brownish wash, especially in birds that preen with iron-rich mud, which stains the feathers a rusty color that has confused more than one first-time observer into thinking the bird had a completely different color scheme. The staining washes out. The gray stays
What does Sandhill Crane eat?
What's on the Menu
The sandhill crane eats everything. Grain, seeds, tubers, roots, berries, insects, crawfish, frogs, snakes, mice, and anything else that fits in the bill and can be swallowed. The bird feeds by walking slowly through agricultural fields and shallow wetlands, probing soil with the bill, flipping debris, and grabbing whatever turns up. A sandhill crane feeding in a harvested rice field in Avoyelles Parish eats waste grain primarily, but if a crawfish shows up, the crawfish was added to the afternoon's intake without hesitation.
Winter flocks in North Louisiana feed heavily on waste grain in harvested agricultural fields: rice, corn, sorghum, soybeans. The fields that most people drive past without a second thought amount to an all-you-can-eat buffet for a bird that will eat just about anything off the ground. The sandhill crane treats a harvested rice field the way most people treat a holiday dinner: systematically and without guilt.
Breeding season further north shifts the diet toward protein: insects, frogs, small rodents, nestling birds. The bird that spent winter grazing rice fields in Louisiana spends summer supplementing the vegetable course with whatever small animal made the mistake of being within reach. The bill does the grabbing. The bill handles every food category equally. A bill that spent January extracting rice grains from mud spends July extracting a frog from a pond with the same mechanical efficiency. The crane didn't retrain between seasons. The crane never had to.
Is Sandhill Crane dangerous to people?
No. This species is not dangerous to people when it is observed without handling or disturbance
