Bird Flu Mutes the Trumpet in the Orchestra of Evolution
The Sandhill Crane's spring migration is normally a sign of hope. Not this year.
by Richard Conniff
This past Sunday, Ohio artist Catherine A. Greene and her two children took what she describes as a mini vacation to visit family in Indiana. It did not go as planned.
Driving on Highway 50 in the flood bottoms between Brownstown and Bedford, Indiana, she began to notice “multitudes of dead sand[hill] cranes.” It went on for mile after mile, “with the sick zombie birds wander[ing] among their dead … I've never seen anything like it, it was so many dead birds for miles upon miles. I am crushed by this.”
Some people were picking up the dead, moved by something other than public safety. Greene, posting on social media, did not say if they were wearing proper protective gear. Other cars were stopped along the road, “just staring at the horror. At the worst part, I drove faster because I didn't want the boys to see it and I couldn't unsee it. Help us all if that's what's coming.”
It was of course bird flu, H5N1, which has already killed 150 million birds in this country, but seldom with such a charismatic bird, and in such public circumstances. The Indiana Department of Natural Resources reported 1500 sandhill cranes dead so far this year, on the northward migration to their breeding grounds. At Fish Lake, near South Bend, 100 dead birds turned up.
Eli Fleace, an avian health specialist with the department advised one person there “to make sure that he and his volunteers are wearing disposable gloves, masks, they're double bagging these birds, putting them in the trash and then disinfecting any equipment that they use, including trailers, your shovels or forks or anything like that.”
Including poultry, Indiana, the nation’s third largest egg producer, has lost 6.5 million birds just since January 1, including 2.6 million chickens at a single farm. The state has described it as the worst animal health emergency in its history. Tennessee and Kentucky have also reported a wave of sandhill crane deaths. In addition to the deaths among wild aquatic populations and commercial and backyard poultry flocks, avian flu has been identified in 68 human cases and one death. At the federal level, the response has been in disarray since the Trump Administration’s mass firings took out key U.S. Department of Agriculture workers specializing in bird flu. Official fret about the price of eggs and see no further.
But there is something about the graceful flight of sandhill cranes and their soul-warming return each spring that makes ordinary humans feel the loss in ways poultry never will. They have been here longer than we have, with the oldest known crane fossil dating from 10 million years ago in Nebraska. The resurgence of the population in recent decades has been a source of hope amid the general decline.
Aldo Leopold, who saw the earlier loss of sandhill cranes as a result of marsh-draining and general habitat loss, wrote about them in A Sand County Almanac: “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 with 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 untambeable past, of that incredible sweep of millennia which underlies and conditions the daily affairs of birds and men.”
Catherine Greenwood clearly felt it, driving through Highway 50 in southern Indiana on Sunday. “I cried so hard,” she wrote, “we won't drive that way home. I didn't want to get out of my car, contaminating my shoes, so the photos lack the horror of what I saw.”
They are bad enough.
I’ll include a poem below in comments. It’s by William Stafford, from his book Even In Quiet Places. He meant the first three lines to capture human feelings. But it’s hard not to imagine that the sandhill cranes are thinking those same thoughts now as they look at the fallen all around them.
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Watching Sandhill Cranes
by William Stafford
Spirits among us have departed—friends,
relatives, neighbors: we can’t find them.
If we search and call, the sky merely waits.
Then some day here come the cranes
planing in from cloud or mist—sharp,
lonely spears, awkwardly graceful.
They reach for the land; they stalk
the ploughed fields, not letting us near,
not quite our own, not quite the world’s.
People go by and pull over to watch. They
peer and point and wonder. It is because
these travelers, these far wanderers,
plane down and yearn in a reaching
flight. They extend our life,
piercing through space to reappear
quietly, undeniably, where we are.
“Watching Sandhill Cranes” by William Stafford, from Even In Quiet Places. © Confluence Press, 1996. Reprinted with permission of the author. (buy now)
Richard, Thanks for the article and poem. Here’s another poem with a similar sense of both awe and sadness. It’s best to remain humble.
Wild Geese | Mary Oliver
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting–
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.