On the evening of January 2, 2022, a group from San Luis Obispo was ending a day of birding on the Carrizo Plain National Monument.
As usual, those semi-arid grasslands had produced a throng of raptors and other migratory songbirds, but their biggest prize didn’t reveal themselves until later. December 2021 was a wet month, with just enough rain to fill most of Soda Lake, a large alkali lake on the northern fringe of the national monument.
As the sun sank behind the Caliente Mountains to the west and shadows crept across the grasslands toward the Temblor Range, three sandhill cranes flew in and waded through the shallows of Soda Lake. Sandhill cranes hadn’t been documented on the Carrizo Plain since 2010.