COBirders,
Yesterday afternoon around 3:30 my wife and I heard/spotted some 40 Sandhills high above our cabin in the Sangre de Cristo range. At first they seemed to be milling about in apparent confusion then reorganized into their migrating formation, heading for Monte Vista. That lasted momentarily though and they resumed milling about for some time until we lost them from view. When first sighted, I guesstimated their altitude at somewhat more than 10,000 feet since our cabin is at 9,200. To cross the range at this point they would have to fly at a minimum of 12,000 feet to get to the San Luis Valley. Their milling about seemed strange to me so I checked a passage about Sandhills in behavioral biologist Bernd Heinrich’s latest book The Homing Instinct (2014). He writes, “When ready, they gather with thousands of others and wheel high in the sky into giant ‘chimneys’, to travel together on their common journey.”
From this I assume that the cranes we saw, rather than climb steadily to gain altitude, were doing it by wheeling. At any rate, they did “wheel” out of sight.
Leon Bright, Westcliffe and Pueblo
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