BY HARRY WEEKES
Sandhill cranes are not rare around here; we see them from the Camas Prairie, all along Highway 20, up into the Sawtooth Valley. They are, however, an unusual-looking bird, so much so that they make a casual sighting an unusual experience. They are big enough to be mistaken for deer, until you stop looking for the extra set of legs and realize you are staring at a bird. They sport jaunty red caps that somehow seem perfectly complementary to their booming throkking—a call that easily connects them to the dinosaurs that they are. And they bob around in the distance, just far enough away to be, well, away. Usually.
Then along comes fall, and you find yourself at the blinking light (our childhood name for the intersection where you either go right to Boise or straight on to Twin—you know, the place with the blinking light?). Whether it’s early morning or later in the evening, at some point in the fall you will be treated to Sandhills en masse—not one or two, not even several pairs, but dozens of them. While birds are always called flocks, this is as close to a herd of birds as you will see (outside of ostrich country).
We are used to skeins of geese honking through the sky. Or clumps of songbirds flitting through the willows. There is something in our psyche that seems not just to like flocks, but to long for them. This probably has as much to do with birds as food as anything. For our entire existence, birds have been on the menu. But there seems to be something else, too. Something I recognize only when I slow down enough to pay attention to it.
And a big flock of Sandhills will make you slow down, stop, stare, and just kind of wonder. It’s when I pay attention long enough that I find something, or start to recognize it. It is a little twinkle of awe. Not the big “Whoah!” feeling I get every time I turn that first corner on the top of Galena Summit and see the Sawtooths, but a subtler, “There is something here that I do not understand” kind of spark.
Biology is pasted onto a physical, chemical, geological world. It is the messy cousin of the sciences. We can send a probe to do a flyby of Pluto. Or rather, we did; in effect, solving one massive math problem. But try and explain why the grasshoppers were back in force this summer, or why whales sing, or why the Sandhills arrived earlier this year, and you’ll start to see pretty quickly that biology unfolds a little differently; that living things necessarily add a different kind of variability.
This is why birds infiltrate our minds. This is why the Sandhills matter. They are one of a thousand signs we used to use to make sense of our world. They are one of the great rhythms we are so wonderful at discerning, and seem just as bent on dampening. The Sandhills always do me a favor—they help me remember. And that is always worth a trip to the blinking light.
Harry Weekes is the founder and head of school at The Sage School in Hailey. This is his 47th year in the Wood River Valley, where he lives with his wife Hilary and their three kids—Georgia, Penelope and Simon—a nice little flock.