Majestic sandhill cranes are dying of bird flu in Indiana

Sean Leone got up before the crack of dawn last month to catch a rare sight right outside his house on Fish Lake, Indiana: thousands of sandhill cranes.

With their tall gray bodies and a hint of crimson just above their beaks, which looks like a burglar’s mask, some sandhill cranes make this lake their home during journeys to points north.

The cranes’ annual visits are one of Leone’s favorite parts of living on Fish Lake.

But about a week after the sighting, Leone noticed something troubling: dead sandhill cranes.

“I started making the phone calls to [the Indiana Department of Natural Resources] on Feb. 16. That’s when I picked up the first three,” Leone says. “Then, about three or four days later, I started seeing more dying and called them again.”

Many of the fallen birds could be seen on the frozen ice sheet; some floated to the shore or got stuck in the grassy brush.

“This is the first time ever seeing sand cranes ever wash up on shore,” Leone says.

The sandhill cranes are being killed by bird flu, or avian influenza, according to the state Department of Natural Resources.

Fish Lake isn’t the only place sandhill cranes have been dying: Some 30 of Indiana’s 92 counties have reported sandhill crane deaths, including Lake and Porter counties, those closest to Chicago.

The Department of Natural Resources estimates that more than 2,700 sandhills have died across the state, and officials believe that is likely an undercount.

“If a crane dies out in the woods somewhere and nobody sees it, we don’t get that one reported,” says Eli Fleace, fish and wildlife biologist with the Department of Natural Resources.

Fleace says this is the first time the bird flu virus has felled sandhill cranes.

“In past years, I have not seen avian influenza affect the sandhills at all,” he says. “My theory is that the virus may have mutated this past year, and it’s been able to infect sandhill cranes more than it was previously.”

Leone says it’s hard watching the majestic birds succumb to the illness.

“They would stand like a statue for several days, and then they would separate from the pack, about a house length or more, and then they would circle around in circles for about an hour or more, and then they would drop. I watched 45 of them die outside my window,” Leone says. “It’s hard to watch all the animals just dying for no reason, especially the number. The amount of them.”

But what happens to all those dead birds?

The state agency doesn’t have the resources to pick them up. That’s why Leone took upon himself to collect as many dead sandhill cranes as possible, taking precautions to prevent spreading the disease.

“Being there were so many, I was concerned about what would happen to our waters,” Leone says. “Once I knew I was safe, I asked some volunteers and asked for donations of bags, gloves and masks, and whomever wanted to help out, and [we] kind of went from there.”

Leone and about five volunteers have collected 123 sandhill cranes, each weighing about 30 pounds when wet and taking up an entire garbage bag.

One of the volunteers is Diane Snyder Cruz.

“When I heard Sean was going to pick the birds up, I thought, ‘Well, that's great that somebody in the community is taking the reins on doing it, but he shouldn't be doing it all by himself,’ ” she says. “As a community member too, I thought it’d be great to help out with it.”

Cruz says she didn’t want the dead birds to hurt Fish Lake’s water quality.

“I'm worried about the dead carcasses floating down to the bottom of the lake. That's what concerns me,” Cruz says. “I was concerned with as many of them are out on the ice and dying out there in the middle of the lake, what that was going to do to it once the lake thawed out.”

She admits not everyone around Fish Lake is sad to see the birds dying.

“You have some people say that there’s too many of them anyway,” Cruz says. “I don’t feel that way. I feel sorry for them, and I know it's life, but it's sad to see them dying like that.

The DNR predicts the sandhill crane deaths will stop once warmer weather arrives and the virus dies off.