“It’s a very loud, strange call,” said Dave Fronczak, a wildlife biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service who studied the regional distribution and population of sandhill cranes for four years, which resulted in the first comprehensive snapshot of their numbers and range since the early 1980s. “I’m usually with people and they’re wondering, ‘What’s that noise?’ It starts out as faint, and I always look up in the sky and say, ‘Oh, there they are.’ Now more and more people are seeing them. It’s like putting a name to the face.”