Crane encounters on the Somerset Levels

A flock of twenty birds around five feet tall really should be easy to spot, but we were failing miserably. The radiotracker bleeped insistently and told us they were dead ahead, but where? Scanning the marshy pastureland, we saw only cows, Lapwings and some solitary Herons. Then suddenly, from behind a clump of sedge half a mile away, all 20 young Cranes rose up and flew in a languid arc above some grazing cattle, then towards us before settling in a meadow a few hundred metres away. Despite trembling hands, I fired off a volley of shots, capturing a scene I’d pictured for years since I first heard of The Great Crane Project’s reintroduction plans: Cranes flying free over a landscape where these spectacular birds last lived some 400 years ago.

Some 300 crane-related place names (think Cranford, Tranmere… “trani” is norse for crane…) suggest that these magnificent birds were once widespread in the UK, but wetland drainage and a royal taste for cranes – killed by Gyrfalcons! – did for them as a breeding bird way back.  The Somerset Levels and Moors, with many areas re-wetted and carefully managed for wildlife alongside farming, are now in perfect shape to host a Crane reintroduction and the birds seemed to be settling in well!

It was uplifting and rather surreal to see these huge birds in flight near my home, as I’d last seen them as eggs just a few months before in wild marshy woodlands near Berlin.  I’ve been working on-and-off as a freelancer for the RSPB Film Unit for the last 3 years, directing scenes and recording sound for films about Eurasian Cranes in Europe and the UK and taking masses of stills along the way. We’d filmed the Great Crane Project team collecting Crane eggs in Germany, guided by dedicated German experts who monitor scores of nests, where cranes are running out of room to breed.  The eggs were then hatched and the chicks reared back in the UK by a specialist team at WWT Slimbridge, who acted as surrogate crane parents, wearing shapeless grey smocks and hoods and wielding model crane heads on sticks to avoid human imprinting, before releasing the fledged youngsters in Somerset.  Any reports of “druids” out on the Levels and Moors in autumnal mists from 2010 to 2014 can be put down to these “Crane mums and dads” leading 5 successive batches of leggy young birds out when they first arrive!

As well as encountering vast flocks of migrant Cranes in Europe, I’ve been lucky enough to see some of the small and slowly growing Crane population in East Anglia, where John Buxton first nurtured their return after a few lost migrants pitched up on his Norfolk estate in 1979. The Somerset reintroduction is designed to back up this natural return, to boost Crane numbers and to ensure the species make a sustainable come-back across the UK, and I’ve been privileged to witness and record this historic project unfolding; it’s been a labour of love for all involved.

I’ve seen how Cranes elicit a strange kind of devotion in their many admirers across Europe and came to know these enthusiastic devotees as “craniacs”.  I’ve also come to appreciate the charisma of Cranes, to marvel at their intelligence and to be haunted by calls that carry for miles as pairs duet in Polish swamp forests, as huge flocks migrate over the Pyrenees and now as Cranes once more dance and bicker on Somerset’s Levels and Moors. I’ve been drawn back time and time again over the last 18 months to photograph them and I must now confess: “My name is Nick Upton and I am a craniac”.  There is no known cure…

Somerset was partly chosen for the reintroduction as winters in the balmy southwest are know to be gentle affairs; Cranes should have no trouble surviving all year round without needing to head south as most cranes do across the continent.  Yeah, right!….  In 2010, the weather gods had other ideas and by late October heavy frosts were setting in at night and by late November all standing water was frozen solid.  Thousands of ducks voted with their wings and headed for the coast, but the cranes stuck it out in freezing Somerset, though a couple went lame temporarily, probably from slithering on ice as they landed on their roost pool.  One of the Cranes was found dead, killed by flying into overhead cables, the scourge of Cranes  across Europe, and another had gone missing and was never seen again.  Could the remaining 18 survive the freeze….?

In early December I got reports that snow, a rare item in Somerset, had settled across the Levels and Moors and I knew I had to try and capture the scene.  December 3rd was a red letter day – or rather a blue finger day – for me. It began at minus 14C and rose no higher than minus 7 and thick fog shrouded the “Crane zone” for all but 15 minutes, but those minutes were magical… In the morning I joined 2 of the RSPB’s volunteers who monitor the cranes whatever the weather. By radio-tracking we knew they were “somewhere near the Sowey River”, when the sun briefly burnt through the fog to reveal the flock much closer than we realised, calmy drinking the only unfrozen water in the area, or standing on one leg to keep at least one foot warm.  My camera’s shutter took a hammering in the next few minutes before they flew off to feed.

More than a year on, the eighteen birds I saw that day are still out there, now looking and behaving quite grown up, and they were joined by a new batch of youngsters in autumn 2011 AND by a wild crane, probably a lost migrant, who is now part of the gang.

To follow the Somerset Cranes’ progress, check out:  www.thegreatcraneproject.org.uk and look out for my next 2020VISION blog