Skeins of Sandhill Cranes (Grus canadensis) circle purposefully amongst sunset clouds before settling down to roost for the night along the channel of the Platte River near Kearney, Nebraska.
What cannot be separated from the experience of seeing tens of thousands of these birds in one place is the experience of hearing them calling and trilling to each other constantly as they coordinate their movements through the waning light. As March gives way to April and then May, upward of 500,000 Sandhill Cranes pass through the river bottomlands and farm fields around Kearney on their way to points further north. Sandhill Cranes represent one of the last great animal migrations of a single species in North America. The Passenger Pigeon, the Buffalo, and Pacific Northwest Salmon are all either extinct, or their populations are plaintive whispers of what they were 150 years ago and the animals can no longer muster a significant migration. One hundred and fifty years represents a hard to fathom amount of societal change for human beings, but this amount of time is also not quite the lifespan of a single Giant Tortoise. In this light, it was thrilling to see these birds, and even more so to see among them a few bright flashes of white. I assume those large, white birds were Whooping Cranes, but they were too far away to be certain.
In centuries and millennia past, the melting snows and attendant spring floods would fill wetlands to the brim with nutrients, worms, and mollusks, and the surging waters replenished the sandbars that afford the Cranes safety at night. Today, the flow of the Platte’s waters is generally regulated by engineering projects, and the birds depend on people to both mechanically clear the willows that would eliminate the sandbars and expose the population to mammalian predators, and to leave corn in the fields for sustenance. The wetlands have mostly been converted to commodity agriculture (dent corn and soybeans), and the Platte braids its namesake channels under human supervision.
Loading contexts...
