Cranes in Sheldon

OTHELLO – There is a land where high sagebrush desert runs on forever: no house, no fence, no lights for 500,000 serene acres, at night the firmament ablaze with stars. Table formations rise tall and long, escarpments hover. Pronghorn you see, bighorn sheep and wild horses and burros, rabbits, sage grouse, horned larks. And Sandhill cranes.

You're on the Sheldon National Wildlife Refuge in Nevada, administered by the US Fish and Wildlife Service complex office in Lakeview, Ore., that oversees the Hart Mountain refuge. A million acres, yet only one biologist position is budgeted. Gail Collins is that biologist.

What with pronghorn being the "flagship species" at Sheldon, Collins' expertise in big game is appropriate. She earned her degrees at Washington State University. She went there because that college is known for its excellent big game program, she said.   

But we're asking about the cranes.

She sees them every spring, in wetland areas on the refuge and even more so in the adjacent Warner Valley, where ranchers raise alfalfa fields. "I see hundreds of cranes; they're there in March and April," she said.

Why don't they go to Othello with the other flocks of 30,000? Collins begs off a guess. For 10 years she worked on refuges in Alaska where cranes nest every summer, but, again, they're not her professional field.

What is intriguing is Sheldon couldn't be more different from Othello. Not to stretch imagination, but the cranes with their ancient fossil pedigree of more than 40 million years, their ephemeral voices, their ability to grip thermals with their huge wings, soaring, all this somehow seems to fit wild Sheldon better than Othello with tractors in the background, spray planes in the air.

Randy Hill, a biologist now at the Ridgefield refuge, had counted cranes around Othello when he worked at Columbia refuge from 1990 to 2010. In general, cranes follow a regular pattern of migration, with yearly fluctuations in staging overlaps clearly tied to food supply, he said.

"I've experienced as many as 20,000 Sandhill cranes at once," Hill recalled. "The year I saw the big build-up, I think it was 2005, they definitely stayed longer because more food was around. There was more dry corn that year rather than silage corn that doesn't leave much crop residue."

From the 1960s on when the first "outlier cranes" made Othello one of their staging sites, the seasonal increase to the 1990s numbers was slow, Hill said.

"The families who're coming now will continue to come to Othello, the parents always bringing the young with them," he predicts.

So what about the 25 percent of Pacific Flyway cranes who don't go to Othello?

"My guess is that they're just more traditional birds. Or maybe the species is programmed to maintain their population by not being in the same place. That's what made the whooping crane so vulnerable, they only had one place in the summer and one place in the winter where they went. They got down to 14 birds; now there are about 400.

"With so many birds coming to Othello, we've actually wondered if we're risking crane health by letting them concentrate so much at Corfu (roosting site)," he said.

Gordon Warrick, US Fish and Wildlife biologist at Othello since last summer, had another theory about the Sheldon bunch. He's observed cranes along the Platte in Nebraska where he worked as habitat manager for the National Audobon Society, and also in New Mexico at Bitter Lake refuge. "Cranes went to the Platte before there was agriculture," he said.

Maybe cranes don't like grain as much as it appears, Warrick suggested.

"When you see them in wet meadows, they're eating lots of invertebrates. I think that they instinctively know that they need protein for breeding in the summer, and invertebrates are their source of protein," he said.

Could there be a genetic component to the cranes' landscape preference? Neither Warrick nor Hill mentions that, although, "some taxonomists now think that there are six subspecies of Sandhill crane," Hill acknowledged.

Maybe it's simply that Sheldon casts a spell over the cranes, just as the refuge charms humans.

"I encounter a lot of birders, hikers, campers, anglers, and they all go to Sheldon looking for big, open spaces," Collins said.

She described Sheldon as a "unique refuge" between 5,000 feet and 7,200 feet elevation. A few mines are still operating there; the famous black fire opal is found on Sheldon. Some man-made ponds also remain, named after individual homesteaders of yesteryear. The mustangs, about 1,200 of them, are a mixed blessing.

"We have to use active control with them," Collins said.

And what's up with the one-biologist-per-a-million-acres ratio?

At the Portland regional office, Bob Flores said it's no secret that the agency is under-staffed.

In fact, the Supervisory Wildlife Specialist position he was recently promoted to is a merged job description covering not only inland Northwest refuges, but all 11 refuge complexes in Washington, Idaho, Oregon, 37 individual refuges in total. Merging two jobs like this was a money-saving step, Flores said.

"As you look across the federal landscape, workforce reduction has been slow and steady," Flores related. "It's a real dilemma, because as people are getting more wrapped up in this information age, our biologists spend more and more time interacting with the public."

Nature festivals are one type of biologists' interaction, of course, but despite the effort and time-consuming aspect of these events, Flores emphasized that they're a fine opportunity for agency outreach. When he was at Othello he was instrumental in making the crane festival grow from 1999 to 2006, with a lot of personal effort as well as getting federal grant monies for its support structure.

On Sheldon, meanwhile, the cranes stand aloof in the cold winds, rarely seeing a soul.