Migrating common cranes

One of the great joys of spending most of my holiday time in south-west France is that even after 22 years of making visits to this part of the world, it still throws up the odd surprise. I've never managed to record cranes while I've been there. I've encountered them a couple of times (flying over the village just once during daylight hours and overhead at night when I wasn't recording). This is a low hit rate as they pass through the area in good numbers, and are large and noisy enough not to go un-noticed by the locals. I guess it's just a matter of timing and I haven't quite timed it right.

My last trip there (October 2024) was a completely different experience, with cranes encountered a lot more regularly. I had several encounters at night (or at least my SM micro did...). Most of these were concentrated around the night of October 22nd/23rd, around the same time that crane numbers in the area were high enough to close Tarbes airport for a few hours.

That's when this recording comes from. Unfortunately it's not the best quality as it comes from the SM Micro (not knocking the device in the slightest, it's just not as good as my field recording set-up). One thing I do like about it is that like many good nocmig recordings, you get a sense of movement that comes from hearing the calls get louder as the birds approach and then fade into the distance as they get further away.

The other thing I really like about it is that you can pick out the calls of the juvenile birds really clearly. BWP lists several calls of young, among them including 'a shrill trilling peeep',

a 'half piping, half bugling voice' and a 'distinctive adolescent sounding peep' given on first winter migration. It's hard to say which of these refer to the calls in this recording as BWP doesn't have sonograms for any of the juvenile calls, but anyway, they should be pretty obvious among the honking clarion calls of the adults in the recording below. In the rolling sonogram, look out for the nice triangular shaped calls.