It is only 2 hours from home to Jasper-Pulaski State Park in Indiana but what you get for about a week this time of the year is a view of upwards of 30,000 Sandhill Cranes coming in from a day of feeding in farm fields around the area to a roosting area at night. There are only 105,000 Sandhill Cranes east of the Mississippi and about 1/3 of them were at JP the day that Bill and I visited. We saw several thousand come in for a landing but they were quite spread out and still coming in as it was getting dark. While the roosting area is quite far away, the noise starts to get deafening as the Sandhill Cranes are not shy about calling out to each other. Once you hear their call you will recognize and hear it over the course of the year as they fly over the Chicago area to/from Canada and Florida for their annual summer and winter migrations. This area in the state park is one of the few areas left for the Sandhills to rest and rejuvenate prior to the final leg of their trip south. This 1,000 acres of the 8,000 acre park is critical to a massive number of Sandhill Cranes left in the eastern part of the US. It was a thrill to see this display and I was thankful for the invitation of the Audubon Society to come and see the Cranes.
