I am hoping that the holidays are raising your spirits. I enjoyed my drive out to my parent's place, and even stayed the night in one of the spare bedrooms. It's spare now, but it once housed my two sisters. My former bedroom has converted to an office and storage area, although my mom no longer pursues her art business. I passed the morning, after having toast and coffee with mums and pops, driving home along a meandering road following the Shiawassee River. The river once powered mills for grinding grain, and I stopped for a few mintues in each one, Argentine, Linden, Fenton and Holly. I've become a bit of a bird watcher, and I spotted a small feeding flock of Sandhill Cranes south of Holly. The cranes flock in large camps in November, preparing for migration. In the day, small packs fly out for feeding and then fly back to arrive at camp as dark falls.
I've visited the three main camps in Indiana and Michigan, but these four cranes were far from the closest camp, the gathering near Jackson, Michigan. In Jackson, the Michigan Audubon Society has a floodland sanctuary where about 2000 - 3000 cranes huddle at night. It has the most amazing older growth oaks, too, trees left over from the days of the Chippewas.
Thus, it meant that another camp had been established, perhaps, and that meant that conditions were allowing the count of Sandhill Cranes to increase. Not too bad for a species that dropped to a handful of breed pairs in the middle of last century. Yes, I really did write the Michigan Audubon Society, and the executive director forwarded my report, which I made specific by giving street corners, to a collector or reports. In a few days, the executive director forwarded the commentary from a sanctuary expert named Ron, who knew of a flock of 200 spotted in Holly Township, another flock of 200 in nearby Atlas Township and a flock of 177 in Woodhull Township, Shiawassee County. He didn't give exact coordinates, unfortunately. He pointed out that Woodhull Township, almost as far west as East Lansing, was too far for cranes to fly for daily feeding. I looked it up, and that's a distance of fifty miles as the crane flies. So it is good to know that two or maybe three flocks have broken off the larger flock in Jackson.
I imagine driving to the field south of Holly an hour before nightfall with my daughter, and she and I can follow the flying foursome as it wings its way to camp, and I'll drive as she spots. If she had been with me that night, that's probably what we would have done. We drive this way whenever we see spotlights too. Sometimes it leads us to the grand opening of a bar. Once, it led us to a haunted house that had taken residence in a outmoded fire station.
I've already talked about my fondness for historical markers. When I visited the Linden Mills, I was ambling across the mill dam on a brick paver walkway across its crest. It's a good walk with the rushing sound of what water the law allows over the dam. Some plumber even hooked up a length of red pipe to turn the mill wheel slowly, a mill wheel with nothing to power and nothing to do but freewheel. I found a rock with a plaque bolted to it, a plaque that won't be readable in a few decades after the snow and rain wears off the brass lettering. It's hard to read now.
The plaque got me going. A son of a local blacksmith named Preston Bradley had taken preaching lessons at the Moody Bible Institute in Chicago, Illinois, and he gathered one of Chicago's largest congregations in the 1930s. While he was at it, he worked with a few men from Fort Wayne, Indiana to establish the Izaak Walton League of America. I've seen their preserves all over the midwest. Walton wrote a book called the Compleat Angler in the seventeenth century, and Preston was quite a fisher of men as well as a fisher of fish. Preston even traveled to England to fish in Walton's usual river, the River Dove, a fishing trip that is well documented by the BBC. I try to imagine Preston Bradley as a lad fishing in the Shiawassee, which I also have done, using fish hooks forged to shape and sharpness by his blacksmith father.
What truly stuns me about this man wasn't apparent to me until I looked it up. During my first visit to Chicago in 1983, when my college roommate had moved back to Chicago to study at Loyola, I visited the Preston Bradley Hall in the then Chicago Public Library, and it was resplendent with a 38 foot Tiffany glass dome, thought to be the largest one in the world. If this is how Chicago honored Bradley, he must have been much beloved. Hitler's Germany before the war refused his entry to the country, a fact that endeared Bradley to Chicago's Jewish community. In a Time article, the internet has such good archives of NYT and Time, I learned that Preston had given his first sermon at 15. Since he started preaching as a Presbyterian, I wrote the Linden Presbyterian Church in the same steepled building since 1863, to see if the church had any records on him. That email, alas, has gone unanswered. It will be easier just to drop by the church some Sunday.
Best,
Wandering Wilbo
Wilbo Chases Cranes in Vain.
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