Photos Courtesy of The Nature Conservancy
Craning at Cranes
When Renee King of The Nature Conservancy invited me to come to the central Platte River Valley and watch a bit of the annual spring migration of cranes, I grabbed the chance. Who wouldn't want to see thousands of birds descend onto the river to roost? What could be better? Perhaps clouds of passenger pigeons, now extinct, darkening the sky. Or migrating snow geese whitening the Missouri River. Certainly craning at cranes was bound to be a class-one experience.
Spotting the Cranes
West of Grand Island I spot them, at first in the sky, looking like geese but not in formation. They move in groups, some two or three, some a dozen or more.
Then I spot them on ground, gray dots, much tinier than cattle but doing the same thing: grazing. And so many of them, in flocks of a hundred or so. They're not in every field. They're choosey. They go for the corn.
At Wood River headquarters, I meet the other gazers, a family of three from Denver, two men from Wayne, Chris Helzer and Renee from the conservancy. We watch Chris's presentation. The sandhill cranes we'll see are the greater cranes, larger than the lesser cranes. From mid-February until the first week in April, they fly through a 75-mile stretch of the central Platte in shifts, 500,000 to 600,000 altogether, but at the moment, about 250,000.
We caravan to the blind. Birds rise from their fields, gray stream after stream billowing across the thin blue sky as though God whipped long gray silk scarves in the air. They move in longer and longer streams, ascending by the hundreds, silhouetted against cumulous clouds.
We gazers walk to the blind, a 15-minute trek along a rough earth path lined with small square pink flags.
"What are those?" I ask Chris.
"To mark the path when we come back," he says. "It'll be dark when we leave the blind."
At the Blind
The blind is a big rectangular box, maybe 10 x 20 feet, with a bench along one side. The other three sides have wooden windows, folded down now to reveal a wall of burlap with some two dozen holes cut in it, the holes scattered at different heights, all next to the river. We move toward the holes, except for Charlie, one of the Wayne men, an old-timer. He's over by the door.
"Take a look," he says, and I gaze across fields away from the river. As far as I can see, all along the southern horizon, gray streams rise and push toward us, moving to the Platte as sandhill cranes have done since the end of the last ice age. I chill. The sight is gorgeous, and beginning to be noisy. Each crane honk sounds to me like a bicycle horn.
"If you listen closely," Charlie says, "you can hear two pitches. The juveniles, they're higher."
I listen closely, but it all sounds like Times Square on New Year's Eve to me.
The cranes drop into the river. Maybe they'll roost in front of the blind, maybe they won't. The first ones settle farther west. Dozens. Then hundreds. We crane our necks. Behind the birds, the sky turns redder.
I watch how the cranes glide in as though they descend in parachutes. "Or like dandelion seeds dropping," Chris says.
The birds land in the river near a sand bar, so close to the bar that they stand in water but their feet rest on sand. "Their legs don't get cold the way ours do," Chris says. "Their major leg artery, full of warm blood, lies close to the major leg vein. The artery keeps the vein warm." Clever cranes.
"You see that?" Chris says as a crane spreads his wings and leaps up and down. "Courtship dance. Oh, they're not courting now, but they mate for life, so we think they do a bit of the dance as a way of bonding as they travel."
"The males leap?" I ask.
"Both. They both do. And notice how the cranes don't sit too close to one another? Just about a beak's peck away."
Then as unexpectedly as a thunderclap, thousands of birds rise and fly from their western sandbars like a flock of bats rushing from a cave, a huge cloud of birds silhouetted against the setting sun, a cacophony of sound. The noise is intense, the sight eerily beautiful.
"Spooked," Chris says. "Something spooked them."
The birds whirl around and settle right in front of us. I watch, holding my breath, as crane after crane parachutes to a sand bar.
"How many?" I ask Chris.
"Hard to say. Maybe 10,000."
Surrounded by magic, I peer through the burlap hole until the sun slips away.
Going Home
Not wanting to spook the cranes again, we wait until it's quite dark. I pat my way along the bench, blindly seeking my hat, my bottle of water.
We sneak out, clustering quietly until the blind's door closes. Then we inch along the darkened path. Chris leads. He knows the path well, having watched the cranes for 10 years now. We walk in silence, noticing how distance flashes of lightning redden the southern sky.
At our cars, we chatter like so many birds, then fly off in various directions. I drive with lightning to my right, 18-wheelers decorated red and gold like Xmas trees to my left, and before me, permanently etched in my mind's eye, a vision of thousands of spooked sandhill cranes rising like one, flapping black against the red sky.
For more information:
The Nature Conservancy
Nebraska Field Office
1025 Leavenworth St.
Suite 100
Omaha, NE 68102
(402) 342-0282
