Sandhill Crane Tracks

**Sweatshirts are 6" larger in chest size than the t-shirts**

"Garment Dyed Heavyweight Tee" - printed on Comfort Colors Tees!

Sandhill Cranes with the scientific name "Antigone Canadensis".  Tracks printed on the front

"When we hear his call, we hear no mere bird. We hear the trumpet in the orchestra of evolution".
Aldo Leopold.  at the back of A Sand County Almanac, are two of Leopold's short essays, The Land Ethic and Marshland Elegy.   Natural History Journal

Hear  cranes trumpeting like fingers moving across the teeth of a bamboo comb. they mate for the long term- often for life. They migrate with their young and teach their young whereto stop. They live for 35 years. They’re 4 feet tall. They’re very social and demonstrative. they  call with a cackling, gobbling, they dance, they bow, they 
pirouette,, they leap and jump with each other. They have a red head, long wings, Between 150,000 to 200,000 cranes sometimes come  that one roosting spot. The crane festival is here in Colorado at Monte Vista wildlife refuge.  The cranes migrate north from Bosque del Apache south of Albuquerque, New Mexico and going first to Southern Colorado then north  through Colorado  on up to Nebraska  on the Platte river where they rest and feed.  You can watch them come in in the evening to roost in the shallows of the river. You can go to the Cornell website and listen to their magnificent calls- or better yet go to her them live. 

Different flocks of cranes have different migration roots- some spend the fall in the central valleys of California, others migrate from the Midwest in Wisconsin south towards the Gulf of Mexico. 
Leopold wrote "the ultimate value in these marshes is wildness, and the crane is wildness is incarnate". He also wrote "So often, we utterly fail to see and properly appreciate that the value in a created thing is bound up in its very existence.  It - the crane, the egret, the bison, the wetland, the grassland, the redwood tree - has value simply because it exists as a piece of this magnificent world. "  " High horns, low horn silence, and finally a pandemonium of trumpets, rattles crooks and cries that almost shakes the bog with its newness, but without yet disclosing when it comes, elastic length of sun reveals their approach of a great echelon of birds. "

Artwork by Craig Blackhill