Sandhill Crane painting: Audubon's plate and other classic portraits

Audubon’s plate: plate 261, “Hooping Crane”

The plate's caption reads “Hooping Crane, young.” Audubon thought the gray cranes were the young of the white Whooping Crane, and that naturalists had named them a separate species, the Canada Crane, only because the gray birds far outnumbered the white ones. He hoped, he wrote, to clear the matter up. Today they count as two separate species.

In March 1810, near Louisville, he showed Alexander Wilson, who had seen only stuffed ones, a flock of cranes, and told him the white birds were adults and the gray ones young. That November, at Henderson, he lay behind a cypress and watched a flock of Sandhill Cranes digging for water-lily roots, half buried in their holes like “a parcel of hogs or bears at their wallowing spots.”

Story: Audubon’s Ornithological Biography, vol. 3 (1835). See plate 261 free at Audubon.org.

More classic portraits, free to see

• John James Audubon, The Birds of America, octavo edition (1840–44), plate 314: “Whooping Crane”. Free scan (New York Public Library Digital Collections)
• Louis Agassiz Fuertes, for Elon H. Eaton’s Birds of New York (1910–14), plate 24: “Sandhill Crane”, with Great Egret, Black-crowned Night Heron and Great Blue Heron. Free scan (Internet Archive)

About the Sandhill Crane

• Sandhill Cranes usually feed on land or in shallow marshes, and gather in feeding flocks outside the nesting season. (Source: National Audubon Society)

The oldest known wild Sandhill Crane lived at least 38 years: it was banded in Florida in 1982 and found in Wisconsin in 2019. That is a record from bird banding, not a typical lifespan. (Source: USGS Bird Banding Laboratory, 2025 longevity table.) How long do wild birds live?

Buying a print?

An original plate 261 is a hand-colored sheet about 26 by 38 inches, printed in Britain in 1827–38; many prints sold today are reproductions or small 1840s octavo prints. How to tell an original from a reproduction.