Migration

Starting yesterday afternoon and continuing on this morning, we've been passed over by a number of large flights of Sandhill Cranes, wending their way south to visit Steve at the Bosque del Apache. I have always loved their creaking croaky cries that you can usually hear long before you can spot them high in the sky.

This reminded me of a fact I learned last year while re-reading Pageant in the Wilderness, Herbert Bolton's book about the 1776 Dominguez-Escalante expedition that attempted to find a travel route from Santa Fe to the San Diego mission. The Spanish colonists in New Mexico watched these large flights of Sandhill Cranes coming south towards them from the Colorado mountains every fall, and came to call those mountains, "La Sierra de las Grullas," or "The Mountains of the Cranes."