Sandhill Crane print

Slate grey, soft as wet ash. A bare crown of red skin. The Sandhill Crane stands in the marsh, head lifted, the long neck and trailing plumes held in that unmistakable upright poise. Reed browns and the pale gold of standing water fill the foreground; the bird simply rises out of the horizontal. It is drawn in the Audubon-style palette, all restraint and patience, exactly the colours the crane belongs to.

Antigone canadensis measures between 97 and 122 centimetres from bill to tail, with a wingspan of up to 213 centimetres and a weight of up to five kilograms. That is not a small bird in a marsh. And yet it is a continental traveller. Every March, more than half a million Sandhill Cranes converge on the Platte River in central Nebraska in the largest gathering of cranes anywhere on Earth. They stage there for three to five weeks, feeding on waste corn and gaining roughly 20 percent of their body weight before fanning north and northwest to breeding grounds that reach into Alaska and across the Bering Strait into eastern Siberia.

The call carries for several kilometres across open wetland: a deep, rolling bugle produced by a windpipe that is partially coiled inside the breastbone. Two birds duetting is a territorial proclamation and a pair-bond display at once. Breeding pairs are socially monogamous and generally stay together across multiple seasons.

The oldest banded Sandhill Crane on record was at least 37 years old.

In the tradition of Audubon, a patient bird at rest in the marsh it has used for two and a half million years.

Full field guide: /species/sandhill-crane/

Printed on Hahnemuhle Photo Rag 308gsm.