It was a perfect day for planting flowers in the many beds around the house. A gentle, day-long rain the day before made watering the new transplants a moot point. Early morning proved to be cloudy and foggy; a delightfully dreary day to set out several flats of annuals — tucking them in here and there amongst the perennial plants which dominate the beds in the yard.

It was chilly for early June and I had on a flannel shirt and fleece vest. The yard was still drippingly wet from the rain and I was forced to wear my rubber muck boots if I wanted to keep my feet dry during the morning's planting session.

No sooner than I had picked up the first flat of cosmos than I heard the familiar cartoonish sore throat croaking of a pair of sandhill cranes coming somewhere north of the house. Until recently sandhill cranes were fairly uncommon in Michigan. In fact back in the 1930s the birds were known to be almost extinct east of the Mississippi. They have since made a bit of a rebound here and we have been seeing or hearing them in our neck of the woods on a regular basis for the past 15 years.

Much as I enjoy seeing a pair of cranes cavorting in a nearby field or flying overhead, it is their hoarse, echoing honking I enjoy best. The sound carries from great distances in the hay and corn fields which dominate the area around my house. The ghostly, prehistoric sounds are perfectly suited for grey drizzly days and the flower planting session was ready-made for an early morning sandhill crane concert.

The sounds from the pair of cranes — they seem to prefer to travel in pairs — was music to my ears and I set the flat of cosmos down and ventured to the back yard to see if I might catch a glimpse of these magnificent birds. Alas, there were too many pine trees between me and the birds who sounded as though they had taken up a brief residence in the field  on the north boundary of my property, a quarter-mile away. I had no desire to walk through the wet knee-high grass and weeds and dripping pine trees to catch sight of these two and contented myself with plopping down a variety of annuals in a variety of flower beds as they loudly communicated back and forth to each other.

Such honking and squawking though!

A short while later I was rewarded as the honking and squawking concert grew progressively louder and louder and the pair of gangly, yet graceful, cranes burst through the overhead fog, flying right over the yard, just above the tops of the windbreak pines alongside the road. It was the briefest of sightings but one which made my dreary morning work so much brighter, so much more enjoyable; a perfect planting day.

And yes, it also proved to be a perfect day for sandhill cranes.

— Michael Jones is a columnist and contributor for the Gaylord Herald Times. He can be reached at mfomike2@gmail.com.