They’re back — Sandhill Cranes Return to Alabama’s Wheeler National Wildlife Refuge!

I visited the Wheeler National Wildlife Refuge Visitors Center on December 19, 2025, my first venture since the winter cranes returned a month prior. I parked in the Center’s lot within 30 minutes of leaving my driveway. Think of it…a world-class wildlife and Nature destination just 20 miles to the WSW. My heart-and-soul bond with these magnificent birds rekindles when I hear the clamorous bugles, rattles, and croaks of 10-15,000 sandhill cranes celebrating their winter feeding and trumpeting their social frenzy in our southern climes.

Cycle fractals define so much in Nature: hydrologic, carbon, nitrogen, food, and life cycles. The same for the rhythms of seasonal, nutrient, migratory, and reproductive pulses, as well as our human birth, youth, maturation, reproduction, child-rearing, aging, sowing seeds, leaving memories, and saying goodbye continuum. Sandhill cranes commonly live 20-40 years. I first witnessed the winter Wheeler cranes 30 years ago (1995). Most of the cranes I saw on December 19, 2025, hatched since then, and yet the teeming flocks seemed unchanged. Such is the beauty, magic, wonder, awe, and inspiration of cycle, rhythm, and pulse fractals.

 

Reacquainting with the Cranes

 

Straight down the slope from the Center display and museum building, thousands of cranes crowded the marsh, pecking and scratching for food, cavorting, courting, leaping, communicating, fussing, and likely just plain extolling the glories of their blessed existence on God’s Green Earth. Every day that I visit from Thanksgiving to mid-February reveals carbon copy enthusiasm. I am sure, however, that their life is not so routine and simple. There are predators: coyotes, foxes, gators, snapping turtles, human hunters, and eagles. And hazards: automobiles, biting winds, arctic chills,  and flooding winter rains. Surely the marauding cranes eventually deplete a mid-December marshland spot rich with seeds, roots, worms, and other invertebrate treats. For the moment, I observed a morning without need or threat. All was well…with the flocks and with me.

 

The cranes tell their tale far better than I. This 58-second video expresses their joy and jubilation with the great crane cycle of life!

 

I retreated the marsh-side, woods-edge observation point to walk the wooded trail to the observation building. Across my many decades of reveling in Nature, I have a storehouse of precious memories. Favorite places, experiences, and even some accomplishments. Listening to the cranes, I mused, what are among my noteworthy auditory memories?

 

I forced myself to make a list. Number one jumped forward, rising above all others. The unrestrained belly laughter of our infant kids and grandkids…so incredibly magnificent, and oh so ephemeral. Like a woodland spring wildflower, the time of infant and toddler contagious and limitless convulsive chortling is brief. We cycle past it. The memories remain, and resurface when we hear another’s child, bringing mist to our eyes as we remember that our son is 49 (1/25/77) and two of our grandkids are graduating high school in May. As I draft this text on the first day of 2026, I am reminded: To every thing there is a season.

Ecclesiastes (3: 1-8 KJV):

To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven:

A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted;

A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up; 

A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance;

A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;

A time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away;

A time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;

A time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace.

 

Less sentimental, a second sound without contest is the great music of over-wintering sandhill cranes. A spring morning songbird chorus is among the top ten. When we lived further north, nothing surpassed the first geese migrating south in the fall…or north in the spring. Aldo Leopold said of Sand County Wisconsin geese:

One swallow does not make a summer, but one skein of geese, cleaving the murk of a March thaw, is the spring… A March morning is only as drab as he who walks in it without a glance skyward, ear cocked for geese.

A pack of coyotes deep in the night ranks high. I have never first-hand heard a wolf pack, yet I am sure it would be a contender. Not all grand sounds are of animal origin. Among them are rain on a tin roof. A gurgling stream. A soft summer breeze through leafy tree crowns. Distant thunder promising rain during a summer dry period.

Other sounds I love include squeaky snow underfoot at sub-zero temperatures. Muted blizzard gales through Alaska spruce. Oregon coastal waves blasting the rocky shore. The list is long. During my 20s and 30s, I ran distance recreationally and competitively, logging miles mostly pre-dawn to avoid stealing time from our young family. Many fellow runners trained listening to music. I loved Nature’s orchestral accompaniment.

I recorded this 59-second video along the trail to the observation building.

 

The observation building nearby brings the cranes indoors, where viewers are invisible to the birds. Microphones pipe in their raucous calls. A perfect day to offer bird images inverted in the water…and to encourage deeper mental reflections on having such a marvel within reach of where I am fortunate enough to live. I recall decades ago visiting Nisqually National Wildlife Refuge in Olympia, Washington. The Nisqually River Delta empties into the Puget Sound. Judy and I loved walking the miles of boardwalk, watching the tremendous tidal surge that rents the delta twice daily. I would love to return to spend a day, but it’s on the other side of the country. It’s not 30 minutes from my garage door to the Nisqually entrance. I will likely not visit again, yet I may check the internet for a video refresher. [Okay, I just watched a seven-minute mini-documentary — a nice break!]

 

I spotted one whooping crane near the opposite woods edge, an observation that one of the birders with a long lens verified. The cranes in this frame are in constant motion, a parallel to our individual human existence. We are in constant motion, but is it purposed movement?

 

The cranes are purpose driven. There is never a dull moment on the marshland.

I recorded this 59-second video of the clangorous cranes.

 

Leopold penned Marshland Elegy in A Sand County Almanac:

Our appreciation of the crane grows with the slow unraveling of earthly history. 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 within the hills. When we hear his calls we hear no mere bird. We hear the trumpet in the orchestra of evolution. He is the symbol of our untamable past, of that incredible sweep of millennia which underlies and conditions the daily affairs of birds and men.

 

Leopold’s elegy arose from his concern that the days of viable crane marshes were at risk, perhaps already having crossed a threshold beyond recovery:

The sadness discernible in some marshes arises, perhaps, from their once having harbored cranes. Now they stand humbled, adrift in history.

Such, thank God, is not a sadness at our Wheeler NWR!

 

Cypress Pond Bonus!

 

Cranes headline Wheeler’s winter show, but the cypress pond near the Center always beckons this old forester. Slanting shadows, clean lines, tall stems, and needle-carpeted forest floor stir my sylvan soul.

 

I recorded this 60-second video along the boardwalk.

 

Cypress draws my eye skyward, where the columnar crowns respect each other’s space. The individual trees don’t touch. The branches are not interlaced. The technical term for the tendency to abide by no touching is crown shyness.

 

I recorded this 59-second crown shyness video.

 

These grand birds, with their prehistoric caricature, star in the WNWR winter show, but I consider the cypress pond as a year-long feature act, even though relegated to the sidelines during the annual crane Super-bird Bowl!

 

Reflecting on the cranes, I think of the sadness not of their demise, but of their seasonal departure by the end of February for their summer breeding grounds. I’ll miss them, but upon reflection I reject the notion of sadness. Instead, I embrace the notion that the cranes, in effect, are departing to a seasonally better place. This morning (January 4, 2026), we sang I’ll Fly Away at church:

Some glad morning when this life is o’er
I’ll fly away
To a home on God’s celestial shore
I’ll fly away (I’ll fly away)

Just a few more weary days and then
I’ll fly away
To a land where joy shall never end
I’ll fly away (I’ll fly away)

The cranes celebrate their annual return North To a land where joy shall never end…at least until next autumn, when chilling winds signal a migratory departure to Wheeler National Wildlife Refuge.

 

Thoughts and Reflections

 

I offer these observations:

1. To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven. (Ecclesiastes)
2. He [the sandhill crane] is the symbol of our untamable past, of that incredible sweep of millennia which underlies and conditions the daily affairs of birds and men. (Aldo Leopold, Marshland Elegy)
3. The cranes celebrate their annual return North to a land where joy shall never end…at least until next autumn, when chilling winds signal a migratory departure to Wheeler National Wildlife Refuge. (Steve Jones)

Inhale and absorb Nature’s elixir. May Nature Inspire, Inform, and Reward you!

 

If only more of us viewed our precious environment through the filters I employ. If only my mission and vision could be multiplied untold orders of magnitude:

Mission: Employ writing and speaking to educate, inspire, and enable readers and listeners to understand, appreciate, and enjoy Nature… and accept and practice Earth Stewardship.

Vision:

• People of all ages will pay greater attention to and engage more regularly with Nature… and will accept and practice informed and responsible Earth Stewardship.
• They will see their relationship to our natural world with new eyes… and will understand more clearly their Earth home.

Tagline/Motto: Steve (Great Blue Heron) encourages and seeks a better tomorrow through Nature-Inspired Living!

 

Steve’s Four Books

 

I wrote my books Nature Based Leadership (2016), Nature-Inspired Learning and Leading (2017), Weaned Seals and Snowy Summits: Stories of Passion for Place and Everyday Nature (2019; co-authored with Dr. Jennifer Wilhoit), and Dutton Land & Cattle: A Land Legacy Story (2023) to encourage all citizens to recognize and appreciate that every lesson for living, learning, serving, and leading is either written indelibly in or is powerfully inspired by Nature. All four of my books present compilations of personal experiences expressing my deep passion for Nature. All four books offer observations and reflections on my relationship with the natural world… and the broader implications for society. Order any from your local indie bookstore, or find them on IndieBound or other online sources such as Amazon and LifeRich.

I began writing books and Posts for several reasons:

• I love hiking and exploring Nature
• I see images I want to (and do) capture with my trusty iPhone camera
• I enjoy explaining those images — an educator at heart
• I don’t play golf!
• I do love writing — it’s the hobby I never needed when my career consumed me
• Judy suggested my writing is in large measure my legacy to our two kids, our five grandkids, and all the unborn generations beyond
• And finally, perhaps my books and Blogs could reach beyond family and touch a few other lives… sow some seeds for the future