Dance is one thing cranes are credited by many societies with giving us. Another is language, perhaps because they are so vocal and a single crane’s calls, amplified by its saxophone-shaped trachea—the windpipe in its long neck—can carry a mile. And unlike geese, with their disciplined, purposeful vees, cranes fly in loose, drifting, chimeric lines that are constantly, kaleidoscopically coming apart and forming, the ancient Greeks imagined, many letters. Crane hieroglyphs were applied to the Temples of Karnak 4,000 years ago.