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No mere bird
Matt Mendenhall, editor
[email protected]In 1937, when the father of wildlife
ecology, Aldo Leopold, wrote the essay
“Marshland Elegy,” the Greater Sandhill
Crane was in steep decline. The essay, part
of Leopold’s seminal work, A Sand County
Almanac, laments the loss of cranes in the
marshes of Wisconsin, his home state.
The Greater Sandhill subspecies has
rebounded from fewer than 1,000 birds to
more than 100,000 — a fact that I’m sure
would delight Leopold were he here today.
In this issue’s cover story, I write about the
plight of the Whooping Crane. It occurs to me that although Leopold had
Sandhills in mind, his essay certainly applies to Whoopers in 2019. Here is a
frequently quoted yet apt passage:
Our ability to perceive quality in nature begins, as in art, with the pretty. It
expands through successive stages of the beautiful to values as yet uncaptured
by language. The quality of cranes lies, I think, in this higher gamut, as yet
beyond the reach of words.
This much, though, can be said: our appreciation of the crane grows with
the slow unraveling of earthly history. His tribe, we now know, stems out of the
remote Eocene. The other members of the fauna in which he originated are
long since entombed within the hills. When we hear his call we hear no mere
bird. We hear the trumpet in the orchestra of evolution. He is the symbol of
our untamable past, of that incredible sweep of millennia which underlies and
conditions the daily affairs of birds and men.
No mere bird, indeed.» PHOTOGRAPHY
View a slideshow of photos
from the book Bringing Back
the Birds by master
photographer Owen Deutsch.» NEWS
The new Federal Duck
Stamp is now available.
The proceeds from each $
sale are used to conserve
bird habitat.» CONSERVATION
In July, birders in St. Louis
acted fast to save an
unusual heron rookery
from chainsaws.Editor Matt Mendenhall
Founding Editor Eldon D. Greij
Contributing Editors Julie Craves, Pete Dunne,
Laura Erickson, Kenn Kaufman, David Allen Sibley
Editorial Consultant Lee Mergner
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Reflective Glass Kills Birds. Do Your
Part to Prevent Window Collisions.
!
2 BirdWatching • September/October 2019
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