The gray-crowned crane is my wife’s clan totem, so their presence was auspicious. The festivities went on for three days, and all the while a couple of dozen gray-crowned cranes, with regal bonnets of sun-shot yellow feathers, were pecking and padding around in the adjacent savanna. In 1990 my wife and I were married in her village in southwestern Uganda. Others are left behind deliberately: As part of a display dance, a crane will pluck and fling one, watching it float to the ground. Crane hieroglyphs were applied to the Temples of Karnak 4,000 years ago.Ĭrane feathers often get caught in the stubble around the Platte. And unlike geese, with their disciplined, purposeful vees, cranes fly in loose, drifting, chimeric lines that are constantly, kaleidoscopically coming apart and forming, the ancient Greeks imagined, many letters. Another is language, perhaps because they are so vocal and a single crane’s calls, amplified by its saxophone-shaped trachea-the windpipe in its long neck-can carry a mile. Dance is one thing cranes are credited by many societies with giving us. imitated the dances of cranes as part of marriage rituals. They dance at the drop of a hat, for all kinds of reasons, not just courtship. The local Bhutanese believe them to be reincarnations of departed monks, and have for centuries performed elegant crane dances, tilting and sweeping long white wings attached to their arms.

Three hundred black-necks return each December to Phobjikha Valley, where in the morning and evening, as they take off to eat and dance and return for the night, they circle repeatedly around a monastery called Gangtey Gompa. These are making their way south, to spend the winter foraging on agricultural residue in Bhutan. Tibet, November 1995: Driving along the Yarlung River, we spot a flock of black-necked cranes in a marshy flat, but when we try to sneak closer on foot with our cameras, they see us from a long distance and, slowly lifting themselves up into the air on their enormous wings, take off.

In my travels I have encountered cranes on three continents. There are 15 Gruidae species, and in all the human cultures that experience the birds, they are revered. The particularly successful sandhill crane of North America has not changed appreciably in ten million years. They are among the world’s oldest living birds and one of the planet’s most successful life-forms, having outlasted millions of species (99 percent of species that ever existed are now extinct). They have been around since the Eocene, which ended 34 million years ago.

Cranes ballet flats