Nature Keeper: Retired Wheeler ranger witnessed the arrival of sandhill cranes at the refuge

By Deborah Storey | Living 50 Plus

Kevin Hamrick vividly remembers the day decades ago when he saw the strange sight of sandhill cranes at Wheeler National Wildlife Refuge.

He was gathered with co-workers in the Visitors Center break room discussing tasks for the day. One said she had seen a couple of sandhill cranes near an area called Penny Bottoms.

Maybe they were great blue herons, he wondered. Hamrick and a co-worker rode out to check.

“Sure enough, there was a pair of sandhill cranes and they had never wintered on the refuge before,” he recalled.

That was in 1996, just months after Hamrick started working at Wheeler.

He took pictures and figured it was a one-off.

“The next year there were 30 or 40,” he said.

The year after that, several hundred.

As most people familiar with the refuge know, the sandhill crane population has grown exponentially since the 1990s. Now more than 20,000 of the gray 3-foot-tall birds spend their winters at Wheeler.

With their associates — the rarer whooping cranes — these winged celebrities have inspired their own yearly celebration. The Festival of the Cranes on Jan. 12-14 will feature music, speakers, photography presentations and more.

The Decatur/Wheeler gathering of these big birds isn’t the largest in the country, “but it is definitely an important staging/wintering area for Eastern population sandhills and whooping cranes,” said Anne Lacy, director of Eastern Flyway Programs at the International Crane Foundation in Wisconsin.

“This spot may have always been an important staging area for sandhills,” she said. “The convergence of appropriate and safe water bodies for roosting and the adjacent agricultural fields that supply good forage are key.”

The birds may have spilled over from Hiwassee Wildlife Area near Chattanooga. Sandhills have simply stayed at Wheeler instead of going south to more traditional wintering areas, Lacy said.

In good news for the festival that celebrates them, the future might bring even more here.

“As cranes have very good generational memory, family groups that use this area continue to do so through the years and teach their young that this area is a great place to stop or winter,” Lacy said. “Thus, the use will increase over time.”

When a few endangered whooping cranes joined the sandhills it became an even bigger deal, Hamrick said. The Crane Foundation tracks them.

“They were actually trying to get them to head to Florida and winter there,” he said. “They were using these ultralight planes and had some gauges set up where they could monitor them for a little while.

“Now we have a certain population of the whooping cranes, which is one of the rarest endangered species in North America,” he said. “At the time there were only about 500 in the wild, and there’s not many more than that now.”

Wheeler’s population of whooping cranes peaked at 27 — so far.

‘The best job’

Now 67 and retired for almost 10 years, Hamrick spends his days fishing, golfing and volunteering.

“I had the best job in the world,” the Decatur resident said of his career — one well suited to a lover of the outdoors. A native of Enterprise, Mississippi — not the one in Alabama, he stresses — he grew up with plenty of critters on a 100-acre farm.

Hamrick started his professional life doing maintenance on oil rigs off the Louisiana coast. His wife told him about a temporary position at a fish hatchery in Mississippi. Perfect, he thought.

“I said, ‘I love fish. I love to fish. That sounds like something I may be interested in.’ ”

He would spend the rest of his career with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, transferring to the Decatur area in the mid-1990s.

“I was really looking for a good place,” he said. “My daughter was going into the third grade at the time. I was really looking at school systems and a good place to move to raise her.”

For years, he was state coordinator for the federal junior duck stamp art contest, a serious scholarship competition. Of nearly 50,000 entries, “we had three or four that finished second,” he said.

Hamrick spent more than 20 years at Wheeler. Before he retired, co-workers said they were going to “immortalize” him, he joked, by asking him to participate in the Visitors Center orientation video.

The four rangers had an office in the Visitors Center, which was built in the 1970s. The refuge itself dates to 1938 and is home to almost 300 bird species and 115 types of fish.

Only the beloved cranes, though, get their own festival.

If the weather is cold up North, the sandhills start showing up in November.

Through late February, “all you hear on the refuge is these cranes making their call,” Hamrick said. “They’re really loud. That sound is constant out there, then all of a sudden it’s nothing.”

Instinctively, the birds know when to go home.

Hamrick was on the golf course one day in late February, looked up, and told his buddies to expect an early spring.

“These cranes were circling really high, like they were confused. I told my golf friends, ‘These guys are getting ready to go.’ You can always tell. They fly really high and act like they’re confused.

“They’re going from the Great Lakes region down to here, even on into Florida,” he said. “They only come as far as the weather dictates for them to come.”

Migratory birds use big avian highways called the flyway system — Pacific, West Coast, Mississippi, Central and Atlantic routes.

It may come as a shock to hear that some people eat the majestic sandhill crane.

“They called them ribeye in the sky,” Hamrick said.

Three years ago, Alabama created a sandhill crane hunting zone restricted to north Alabama (excluding refuges). Hunters draw for permits and must pass a sandhill identification test.

The Alabama Department of Conservation and Natural Resources educates hunters so they don’t mistake a sandhill for a snowy white whooping crane.

“They look just alike other than one’s white and one’s gray,” Hamrick said.

Wheeler is the largest and oldest national refuge in Alabama, Hamrick said, with 35,000 acres in the main complex and eight smaller satellite locations.

A farming program on a portion of the refuge is designed to leave 20% of corn and soybean crops for sort of a bird buffet.

When Wheeler was established in 1938, it was considered a refuge for the Canada goose. One of Hamrick’s first jobs was to read their leg bands through a spotting scope — white, local; blue, migrant; orange, James Bay.

“It really turned into a crane refuge instead of a goose refuge all of a sudden,” he said.

Looking back, Hamrick wishes he had started a journal of the hundreds of bird species he’s seen through the years — including ibis, a harlequin duck and a Eurasian wigeon — a pretty little duck that drew people from miles away.

Hamrick is more than content filling his days with fishing, golfing three times a week and volunteer work at the refuge. He helps with the refuge Clean and Learn Day, an educational and clean-up event.

Even at its best and with plenty of hobbies, the retired life is an adjustment.

“You’ve got to get used to it,” said Hamrick.

Read More: Festival of the Cranes Event Locations and Schedule