Alabama refuge is a paradise for birders and thousands of migrating sandhill cranes
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In flooded agricultural fields near the Tennessee River, tens of thousands of sandhill cranes stand tall among broken corn stalks and shallow water searching for corn, berries, seeds and insects. The sound and sight of so many cranes clustered together creates a chorus of trills, trumpets and honks throughout the Wheeler National Wildlife Refuge Center in northern Alabama during the winter.
The annual migration of sandhill cranes brings bird-watchers in droves to see the tall birds up close, but also the chance to catch a glimpse of the rare and endangered whooping cranes that migrate in much smaller numbers to Wheeler. Alongside the cranes, plenty of other birds can be spotted at Wheeler, including geese, ducks, bald eagles, kestrels and hawks.
“It’s a birder’s paradise,” park ranger David Young noted. The cranes, with their distinctive red foreheads and gray feathers, fly to Alabama from the Great Lakes annually. The sandhill cranes started staying overwinter at Wheeler starting in the mid-1990s and the numbers increased dramatically in the mid-2000s, Young said. Last year, the sandhill population that wintered at Wheeler reached a new record of 30,000 cranes.
“Here in the Tennessee Valley, we have three things that these cranes need,” Young said. "The wide open fields here around our visitor center. The leftover crop and the natural foods that they like to forage on in those fields. And then open mudflats and shallow water on the Tennessee River and its tributaries.”.
