Christy Yuncker Photo Journal

• Home
•    Display Dictionary on the web
  • Social signals
  • Dance postures and steps
  • Attack & defense
•    Alaska Sandhill Crane Blog
  • Twin colts in 2010
  • Local ecology and novelty
  • Current blogposts
  • Origins of the blog
•    How birds think Blog
  • Brighter brains, light heads
  • 1-Evolutionary origins
  • 2-Brain wiring plan
  • 3-Mental maps of locality
•     Crane biology
  • Are cranes social?
  • Why do cranes dance?
  • Crane response to death
  • Walkabouts and novelty
  • Colt injury delays migration
•    Colt Education
  • 13 week Summer School
  • Core curriculum
  • Crane Kindergarten
•    About us

Are cranes neighborly?

Site and mate fidelity are legendary among cranes. On the basis of photographs, body language, and behavior, Millie and Roy are the same cranes we have watched since 1995.

We often hear Millie and Roy unison calling and being answered by other cranes in the valley, probably from ponds that are a few kilometers from each other. If Roy and Millie's calls are not reciprocated, Roy may fly off, apparently to investigate. We suspect that these conversations might be more than territorial defense. The Goldsteam crane community may have social structure.

Dr. Bernhard Wessling used sonograms of crane calls to identify individual European Cranes in a marshland near Hamburg, Germany. Dr. Wessling found that except for one case of divorce, the pairs stayed together and tended to nest in the same territories from 1997 through 2004. The crane calls we hear in Goldstream Valley suggest a similar cluster of territories but we lack enough data to know if the neighborhood is stable from year to year.