A cousin of the Whooping Crane, these Sandhill Cranes visit the fields around here each winter. Sometimes you will see a dozen or so, sometimes they congregate in the hundreds. Whenever they gather in any numbers, they can be loud enough to cause you to shout to be heard.

I remember as a young man sitting in a deer stand in south Texas as the Sandhill Cranes would fly in and scare off all of the deer that would be feeding in the wheat field I was sitting on. Back in those days you could have a hundred or better deer eating as two or three hundred cranes settled down on the same field…Honking as they came in for a landing.

These three were eating in the open fields down at the Bar X Ranch west of Angleton. The Bar X is also a great place to catch almost tame white tailed deer.