I cannot see the cranes this morning, but I can hear them. They are somewhere in the basin of the valley where the yellow, cow-cropped grasses end and the thicket around the water begins. The Sandhills arrived the night before as a wild flurry of sound, drifting in just after dusk when the silhouette of mountains against sky became black on midnight blue and I could not make their bodies out against the dark. I wonder how the cranes knew about the water. Was it the sharp smell of melt? Could they hear the trickle of liquid around rock? Or was it the outline of the snow-fed creek in the moonlight, like the white space between a fingerprint’s arcs and whorls, that was so identifiable from the air? …

This Field Note was written by Claire Voris. Would you be interested in writing one? Contact Allison De Jong, Field Notes editor, at adejong [at] montananaturalist [dot] org or 406.327.0405. Please visit the Field Notes website at the Montana Natural History Center for more information.