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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Othello, Wash., greets sandhill cranes

Birds stop over before migrating to Alaska for summer breeding

Ron Judd Seattle Times

OTHELLO, Wash. – The invasion occurs every spring. Like clockwork, the visitors seem to drop from the sky. Once assembled, they prance around in fancy plumage not often seen in these parts, engage in hilarious courtship rituals and saunter around like they own the place.

And those are just the bird geeks in Subarus from Seattle.

The prey they’re seeking – often with a pair of $1,200 binoculars or a spotting scope cradled like an infant – is the elusive sandhill crane, tens of thousands of which drop in on Othello every March.

To the cranes, the fecund lands in and around the Columbia National Wildlife Refuge are like an avian Fred Meyer store: It’s one-stop shopping for everything they need for the coming long push north to Alaska for summer breeding.

Water, for a roosting refuge? Check. The Potholes Reservoir, the Crab Creek drainage, and seep lakes provide an abundance you can see not only from the several-thousand-foot soaring height of a migrating crane but from space. It’s not really natural, per se – the water is backed up from the various dammings of the Columbia Basin Irrigation Project. Doesn’t matter to birds.

Food, like downed corn crops? Check. The transformation of this former desert to fruitful agricultural land over the past half-century has opened the buffet line for cranes and other migratory birds in search of high-test fuel for their next flight. Cranes began stopping here, rather than just flying over, in the 1970s.

There’s safety, too. Many sections of the Columbia refuge, established in 1944 as a byproduct of the Columbia Basin Irrigation Project, are closed to humans during the crane’s spring and fall migrations, allowing them to mingle and make their throaty cooing calls in absolute peace.

Unassuming Othello thus is on the mental map of a good chunk of the North American crane population. It’s the largest single staging area for this group of some 25,000 (mostly lesser) sandhill cranes that breed in Alaska. And the town for the past 14 years has taken advantage, with a Sandhill Crane Festival that smartly combines wildlife tours with natural history and wildlife lectures at Othello High School. The event draws up to 1,500 visitors.

Over the weekend, most of them were out on school buses, bouncing around on gravel roads in search of crane nation. A three-hour tour of the visually stunning refuge provided a close-up glimpse of the region’s rich wildlife: great horned owls, numerous songbirds and waterfowl, a swimming muskrat and somewhat-rare (now) birds such as the loggerhead shrike. All could be seen from a road normally locked and closed to the public in spring.

But the big show was saved for twilight Friday. Refuge managers opened a gate in Marsh Unit 1 near O’Sullivan Dam along the Crab Creek drainage, allowing the bus to creep forward into a grassy-floored canyon. Across the creek, around a bend, above a large sandbar in an open meadow, stood hundreds of sandhill cranes, the uncontested showy redhead of North American bird species.

The birds, which stand up to 4 feet tall on pipe-cleaner legs, are a stunning, prehistoric throwback, looking and sounding – at least one can imagine – very dinosaurlike. The species dates back as far as 40 million years, and spying on this flock feels like a spectacular glimpse into Earth’s past.

With a stop at the wildlife refuge headquarters in Othello for a map, it’s not difficult to find the cranes, which will linger here another two or three weeks. They’re best viewed in fields south and west of town during morning and evening feeding times. They fly back to roost in less-accessible areas inside the refuge at midday and at night.

Viewers, of course, should exercise common-sense wildlife-watching etiquette: Stay on roads, don’t block traffic or trespass and don’t do anything to spook the flocks. That’s all that’s asked by the friendly folks in Othello, who saw sellout crowds this year for a festival that almost didn’t happen.

The event was canceled in midwinter when volunteers and available speakers for the lectures were lagging. City of Othello staff members picked up the slack and rescued the festival, which is a godsend for local businesses.

Part of the motivation was the realization that if Othello dropped the ball on the cranes, some other local town was sure to swoop in and take advantage.

“You can bet Quincy was going to snatch it right up!” longtime resident Barbara Pedersen, 85, said Saturday morning at a Rotary-sponsored pancake breakfast in the high school gym.

The festival’s near-death experience might have given it new life, she said. “Now, instead of the crane-festival committee, it’s the crane-festival community.”