If hollywood did a movie about Mark Meissenburg,
they could get Dustin Hoffman to play the lead and call the movie
"Crane Man." A California native, Meissenburg takes more hunters
after sandhill cranes than any Texas hunting outfitter, and his
clients are successful at filling their bag limit 98 percent of the
time.
Meissenburg has a degree in psychological
anthropology, but that doesn't make him a savant when it comes to
the stately sandhill, the jumbo jet of North American game birds.
A mature greater sandhill (the largest of three
supspecies) may weight 14 pounds and ride the wind currents on wings
that span more than seven feet. If birds truly descended from
dinosaurs, you could shake the sanhill's family tree and a
pterodactyl would all out. The grain-fed crane is sometimes referred
to as the "rib-eye of the sky."
Along with migrating geese, the sandhill crane's
high-pitched, trilling call is a harbinger of autumn for many
outdoorsmen. Like other waterfowl, cranes migrate south from summer
nesting grounds on the prairie potholes of the western U.S. and
Canada. Their ringing call is so loud that you can often hear
migrating cranes that are flying so high they cannot be seen.
When a flock descends on a decoy spread, their
calls create a maddening cacophony that nearly overpowers the
senses.
Sandhilss winter in farming country from the
Texas Panhandle to the Gulf Coast. The Amarillo to Big Spring
corridor is a sandhill freeway, mostly due to vast fields of
alfalfa, milo, maise, corn, wheat and other crops that serve as a
crane cafeteria spread over several thousand square miles.
"Cranes are not like geese," explains Meissenburg.
"Geese get into a pattern where they fly from the roost to a
specific field to feed every day. Set up in that field and you'll be
a successful goose hunter. Sandhills may fly 20 miles from the
roost, stopping along the way to spend an hour in one field, two
hours in another. They'll hit eight to 12 fields a day, plus various
water sources. With cranes, you have to know their movement patterns
through the entire day."
The Crane Man cannot predict crane movements more
accurately than other hunters, so he relies on three key factors.
He uses large, portable blinds that totally
conceal his hunters. The oversized structure may look obvious to a
human observer, but cranes tend to ignore the straw-colored blind,
as long as they cannot see humans or movement. Meissenburg uses a
decoy spread that features mounted sandhill cranes. Finally, he
wears the cranes down through persistence.
"I probably drive 40,000 miles during the course
of a hunting season," Meissenburg said. "When I'm not hunting
cranes, I'm scouting where the birds are moving and what time
they're using certain fields and waterholes."
