Day 69 - Craniacs
There’s a reason we named our farm Craneview on Plainview. Yes, we love wordplay, but we love birds as well. We have an array of birdfeeders scattered throughout the yard. Whether it is a stunning cardinal or a greedy grackle, our entire family gets a kick watching and identifying our feathered friends. Though we are fans of them all, we are especially fond of cranes. We may even be craniacs. One of our favorite destinations is the International Crane Foundation in Baraboo. Knowing we now have a backyard where sandhill cranes regularly visit was a highlight of the property acquisition. Seeing a resident pair raise a chick was an exciting adventure that gave us daily joy. We love hearing their calls, loud as it may be. We enjoy setting out corn cobs for them to pick at in the early morning hours. We get excited catching them in action while we explored our big backyard.
One of the goals we have in our restoration is to make it more appealing for wildlife. We heard many opinions and ideas during the learning process, but a message we heard again and again was a simple one.
“If you restore it, they will come.”
In other words, a great way to attract wildlife to your land is to make it the way it should be. Getting rid of the bad. Putting in the good. We started this with a full-blown attack on RCG and will continue it with adding native plants and removing other invasive species.
Paying attention to the birds is a great way to monitor the health of the land. Birds are pretty smart and pretty selective, so if we saw a diverse collection of birds visiting and hopefully setting up habitats on our land, we knew we were making positive changes to improve the health of our ecosystem.
We envision creating a bird blind where we can observe birds even more closely. We look forward to putting up birdboxes to provide safe places for birds to nest and raise their young.
While creating a haven for wild birds is part of our master plan, plans for domesticated ones came to fruition much sooner than anticipated.
