Page created on : April 15, 2002
Last updated : June 5, 2005

A tall slate-grey bird, the sandhill crane has a distinctive patch of bright red skin between its eyes and a unique trumpeting call. Standing over a metre tall, with a wingspan of two metres, sandhill cranes are birds of open habitats, nesting mostly near marshes, bogs, open muskegs, wet tundra and wet prairies. In flight, they make use of thermal updrafts and sometimes fly so high they are not visible to observers on the ground.