At the end of January I made my third annual visit to the Vancouver Lake Lowlands in southern Washington to meet up with the migrating Sandhill Cranes. I’ve written about the wintering habitat created there by the Columbia Land Trust in my previous blog posts from 2022 and 2023. On this visit, I saw several hundred cranes, mostly in the fields to the north of road between the lake and Frenchman’s Bar, which worked out well as I had decided to park at the lake and walk the trail to Frenchman’s Bar. I could hear the cranes before I could see them, but with some scrambling along the berm separating the road from the field, I was able to get a good look at these amazing creatures. As always, there were plenty of other birds in the area, including a diversity of raptors. And of course, geese. Thousands of geese, all with something to say.