The leading wave of sandhills - as many as 3,000 birds -
blasts off the table-top flat roosting field a mile to the east, a
trumpeting, squalling, squawking wall of feathers and bills and
leathery feel rising to meet the morning's first thermal that
carries them high into a robin's egg blue sky.
Longtime crane guide Mark Meissenburg's admonition to duck back inside the
grass-lined portable blind is an overstatement of the obvious, but
we follow instructions anyway. Crouching slightly to keep our heads
clear of the blind's sliding roof panels, we gather our though and
clutch our shotguns as the cranes drift over our hiding spot,
checking out the full-mounted decoys.
Primal and ancient, one of the true harbingers of winter, the
cranes' cries, louder and now a more distinct series of yelps and
yodels and trills, tear apart the still morning air. The rush of
wind over 7-foot wings lays down a bass undertone to the tenor choir
of thousands, all singing the same song.
Bee the dog is shivering. I'm shivering.
Cranes are landing with thuds and swoops of wings.
It's go time.
"Ready," Meissenburg is saying. "Now".
Panels are flung back and to the ground. The few sandhills
that have already landed among the 40 decoys strain for air that
will lift them back into the sky. The few hundred that were closing
on the decoys scatter to the four winds, but half a dozen swing to
my right. The little 20-guage side-by-side swings with them, picking
up the lead bird, now 30 feet above the ground.
Sandhill cranes are cousins of the famed whooping crane,
though unlike their endangered relatives, sandhills number in the
hundreds of thousands, and they've had little trouble adapting to
modern farming practices and changing habitat. After nesting in
Canada and the northern United States (some travel all the way to
Siberia), the birds' winter migration brings them down through the
Great Plains and into the Texas Panhandle.
Meissenburg emigrated from California just to hunt them,
establishing Panhandle's Best Outfitters in Amarillo.
"I love it," he says. "Cranes will fly as far as 20 miles a
day to feed. We just have to find where they are each day and where
they're going."
To do that, he scouts every day, driving as many as 40,000
miles each season just to stay on the birds.
Meissenburg also takes hunters for duck hunts on some of the
Panhandle's many playa lakes, the shallow depressions that gather
and hold rainwater, attracting hundreds of thousands of wintering
ducks and geese, in addition to the sandhills.
In one morning's short hunt, we hid four
hunters on a high spot
in one lake and quickly killed four limits of ducks, 14 mallar
drakes and a string of teal that included bluewings, greenwings and
the second cinnamon teal I've ever killed. There were as many ducks
in the air as I've ever seen.
But it's cranes that fire Meissenburg's imagination, that
cause him to mount his own decoys and stock equipment trailers with
dozens of the mounts that can be unloaded and set up near the large
portable blinds he also carries.
"The mounted decoys are the secret," he says. 'Nobody else is
doing that, and it's what you have to do to consistently kill these
cranes."
More than 98 percent of his hunters kill their limit of cranes
each year, he says.
Bent over in my lawn chair inside the A-frame blind
Meissenburg has made, I'm thinking not of limits but of the blizzard
of sound that's descending around us.
At Meissenburg's command, I'm up and finally free of the
blind, picking up an adult bird and squeezing the trigger.
The crane folds and falls and I swing ahead to the second bird.
The same result.
Bee is out of the blind and hauling the huge bird back, even
as the next wave of cranes arrives, squalling, squawking and
yodeling their way across the Plains.
Mark Meissenburg hunts ducks, geese and cranes each day of the
Panhandle season.
Contact him at (806) 467-0273.
~
Mike Leggett
Austin American-Statesman
November 22, 2007
