When I first heard the rattling call I was walking along a small lake in Ontario, east of Sault St. Marie and West of Sudbury. I’d been driving my little camper for eight hours, after getting up in the lovely Two Rivers Campground in Algonquin Provincial Park. Since I was tired and since it was late in the day I thought: you are hallucinating. There can’t be Sandhill Cranes here in the far north in early September.

When, at 3 in the morning, I again heard that distinctive call I thought: this is a dream, no cranes.

In the morning, I emerged from the cocoon that is my little camper and scanned the range of RVs in the tidy campground, the set up mobile homes for those who came through the season, the more portable campers that were there a night or two. My eye was drawn to a bird feeder tempting in Goldfinch set up near one of the mobile homes. And there stood two cranes. Not plastic statues of cranes, as you might imagine in such a campground, real winged, breathing birds. They tip toed as delicately as a long-legged bird can, inspecting the short grass and only half-wary of me and a woman walking her dog. Cranes. In Canada.

I’ve always seen Sandhill Cranes in Arizona, the desert, and so think of them as birds that love the heat and dry. They fly into Wilcox, east of Tucson, by the hundreds, thousands, landing and taking off all flailing legs and wings. But there never seem to be actual collisions. I’ve stood, mesmerized by the loud, purring sound of the birds, and by the sheer numbers, all come to spend the winter there where it’s warm, where there’s food.