Ode to a Whooping Crane

Kathryn Jones

June 5, 2022

We steer the boat into the mouth of Mesquite Bay

past pink and turquoise condos on the tourist beach

Searching for the last flock of Whooping Cranes

at Aransas, marshy melding of land, water, and sky.

True Winter Texans, they arrive each autumn,

migrating from nesting grounds in Canada,

Traveling by instinct, calling to each other

with their ancient songs – a whooping kar-r-r-o-o-o.

Floating down to forage in warm waters until spring,

they teach their colts to hunt the shallows for blue crabs,

Then take flight and head north to their summer place

to mate, build nests, and hatch a new generation.

Once ten thousand strong when Spanish explorers arrived,

their numbers dwindled to just twenty-one – shot, poached,

Habitat destroyed, caught in power lines, run over by cars.

Eight hundred survive, still endangered, seeking refuge. 

We raise our binoculars in the morning fog to see

white ghosts on black stilts prowling for prey close to shore.  

We pray these feathered angels return next year, and the next.

Such grace saves us, too. We are all endangered now.  

Kathryn Jones is a journalist, essayist, author, and poet. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Texas Monthly, and in the anthologies A Uniquely American Epic: Intimacy and Action, Tenderness and Action in Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (University Press of Kentucky, 2019) and Pickers and Poets: The Ruthlessly Poetic Singer-Songwriters of Texas (Texas A&M University Press, 2016). Her poetry has been published on tejacovido.com, in the Langdon Review of the Arts in Texas, and in the upcoming Odes and Elegies: Eco-Poetry from the Texas Gulf Coast (Lamar University Press). She is finishing a biography of Ben Johnson, the Academy Award-winning actor and world champion rodeo cowboy, to be published by the University Press of Mississippi. She was inducted into the Texas Institute of Letters in 2016.