Sandhill Cranes

(Click on image to enlarge)
Photo by Steven R. Emmons of Pacific Southwest Region U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (via Wikimedia Commons).

This time of year, if you're outside in the Ainsworth/Hobart area, you may see or at least hear migrating sandhill cranes in flight. I usually see them in the late morning or early afternoon. Sometimes they fly in V-formation, like geese, although they don't seem as well organized as geese. Sometimes a bunch of cranes get together and fly up to some ridiculous altitude. There they just mill around in a circle that's inwardly turbulent but outwardly cohesive as the whole flock drifts slowly in one direction; and all the while they call to each other, with that eerie, mournful, gurgling cry, which carries so well you can hear them even when they are only little dots up in the stratosphere.

I only mention them because I found this item in the Hobart Gazette of March 30, 1906:

Albert Halsted had the good luck on Tuesday of killing one of three fine, large sand-hill cranes seen upon the prairie southwest of town. The bird measured seven feet from tip to tip of wings and stood five feet high. They are pronounced excellent eating.

Hmmm ... he shot a sandhill crane, and now he's dead. Coincidence?

(I haven't been able to determine whether Albert Halsted was any relation to Willard Halsted, who once owned a general store in Ainsworth.)