They are polyphyletic, with five to six sub-species, two of which are non-migratory. The Florida sub-species is one of these and probably being negatively impacted by the invasive python population expansion, at minimum via egg predation, since they only lay two per clutch.
Greaters are less numerous and slowly spreading their range eastward in the continental U.S. I worked for a land surveying and engineering company summers to pay for college. We would often see pairs during spring in courtship displays while doing section breakdowns and large parcel surveys in southwestern lower Michigan. Now, it is common to hear them in the background on wetlands, or see them walking down the highway shoulders hunting insects and reptiles. In Fall, we see flocks frequently while goose hunting. This year we were down by Cooks in early September, on the west side of Indian Lake, hunting geese in a cut grain field. We were worked by more sandhills than geese that morning to the point where they built-up to a flock of around 500 in the lower leg of the L-shaped field we were hunting. The farmer called my hunting partner's cellphone to tell him he was in the wrong spot, another field of his to the south a little over a mile was "full of birds". We eventually pulled the spread three birds short of our limit of ten geese and drove down to check the field. It, too, was full of sandhills-again, hundreds of birds at the far end. We glassed it to see if we were missing any geese among them... Nope!
Having hunted them for over a decade, I can attest to them as excellent table fare- dense meat, sweeter than beef, with a pork-like texture and sweetness. Smoked with fruitwoods, they are excellent, too! They have an interesting habit of setting-up to make their final approach to the decoy spread, often coasting along motionless, growing in silhouette all the while, until they are at fifty to sixty yards out and then just drifting off to the downwind side to make another approach. They see VERY well! About forty percent of the birds shot have their feet down to land, with the remainder taken inside of forty yards as the pass over the spread. Around mid-morning small flocks and family groups of three birds will begin to trade around again in what we call the "looky-lou flight". This often gives you a better chance at getting birds committed to land as they look around for better pickings prior the daily shooting closure time.
I wish I had saved the crane hunting tutorial, with pics, that I posted to the Mighty Layout Boys website over a decade ago!
Deception Outdoors makes the best decoys, short of stuffers. I have hunted them with silo-socks with mixed success in NoDak. As the wind speed builds, we found we did better with fewer motion decoys and just a mix of the old Sport Plast full bodies and silhouettes. I modified a Tim Grounds cocabola long Honker call that never worked well as a goose call for me via adjusting and shaving the reed more to get it to break in the rolling "R" crane call. A standard Roy Gonia whistle can make the nasal "peent" of juveniles, which is the call we had our initial success with on sandhills on a foggy morning northwest of Max, at a couple of ponds we refer to as garbage ponds (a small nearby coulee is a mini-dump on the ranch for everthing from old bee hives to fence posts.) on a widgeon hunt nearly twenty years ago in NoDak. Deception Outdoors has a new acrylic crane call that is spot-on. Also, Knutson's is importing Sport Plast's sandhill full-body decoys in the new body styles. You should re-paint these, upon receipt, to a more effective color scheme. Dive Bomb makes a commercial silhouette out of campaign sign corrugated plastic sheet material. Their stakes are poor quality and the decoys can be overwhelmed by wind easily.
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Mark Allen with a limit from 2017 hunt in NoDak. Note the too bright raffia blind material. Often, if you check the work road exit point the combine operator will clean the machine prior exiting the field. There will be a very usable pile of straw to employ in camouflaging your field blind. Raffia will work, but is needs to be aged to the point where it doesn't shine in bright sunlight. Like geese, it is very difficult to get birds to work-in all the way in foggy conditions, so shift to BBB and pass shoot them as they break-out of the fog. Largest concentration of birds I have seen out there, we estimated at around 6,000. After have several thousand of them calling from about a half-hour prior legal shooting time until you pull the decoys, their call and calling resonates in your head for hours after the hunt is over. They are a truly fascinating bird!
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My sister-in-law ran into this pair outside the dollar store in Winterhaven, Fla., during a quick trip to pick-up paper plates for a cookout.
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