Indeed, sandhill cranes are one of the oldest known bird species living today. He is the symbol of our untamable past, of that incredible sweep of millennia which underlies and conditions the daily affairs of birds and men… We hear the trumpet in the orchestra of evolution. When we hear his call we hear no mere bird. Aldo Leopold, the great American author, philosopher, conservationist and father of the United States’ wilderness systems, once wrote of sandhill cranes in his “Marshland Elegy,”
