FOR THE BIRDS
Nebraska is a mecca for lovers of the sandhill crane
We hardly know where to look with whooping cranes making whoopee in one part of Nebraska's Platte River, sandhill cranes dancing and foraging beside them in the shallow water, and American white pelicans snuggling placidly in between all the action.
And then there's the cacophony that sounds like a cross between a roaring stadium full of fans and a Jurassic Park soundtrack.
There's nothing like the spring sandhill crane migration as 1.2 million birds rest and refuel in Nebraska's corn fields while flying between wintering areas in Texas and Mexico and their breeding grounds in Canada, Alaska and Siberia.
Jane Goodall, the world's most famous conservationist, calls it “a spectacle everyone should try to experience once in a lifetime.” Or more. The elegant cranes with their silvery-grey feathers and red crowns made such an impression on me in 2016 that, like Goodall, I felt compelled to return. This time
I would not only commune with the birds at sunrise and sunset in the river, I would follow them to the fields and get to know Nebraska during the day.
That's how I find myself in a heated blind at sunrise in March during the Crane Trust Overnight VIP Crane Experience.
More than 80 per cent of the world's sandhill cranes converge here on the Platte River in central Nebraska between late February and early April. Millions of migrating ducks and geese arrive with them.
The omnivorous cranes stay four to six weeks, gaining up to 20 per cent of their body weight, munching mainly on waste corn in harvested fields but also plant tubers and invertebrates like snails, earthworms and insects in wet meadows and grasslands.
On that VIP morning, we spot several rare whooping cranes — bright white with black feathers at the end of their wings — mixed in with the sandhill cranes. In 1941, fewer than 20 remained after more than a century of overhunting and habitat loss. Now there are 836 with 543 in wild migratory flocks and another 293 in captivity.
“To see one or two whooping cranes is rare but to see them gathering and coming together as a group and selecting that one spot, it makes everything we do here worth it,” whispers Crane Trust range manager Joshua Wiese. “I've got goosebumps on the back of my neck and arms.”
When Megan Soldatke, a biological monitoring fellow, spots two birds copulating through her scope, she lets out a whoop of her own. Then we watch a Cessna doing an aerial count. There are about 486,000 sandhill cranes out today plus 91 whooping cranes
“It seems you picked the lottery day for crane viewing, so good work,” Matt Fong, director of fundraising and outreach, says later over breakfast.
To sit in the dark in a blind and watch as the sun rises and the birds take off by the thousands is equally surreal.
It's also impossible to say what's better — sunrise or sunset — so do both with the Crane Trust near Grand Island and the Iain Nicolson Audubon Center at Rowe Sanctuary near Kearney.
The Crane Trust was established in 1978 as part of a court-approved settlement of a dam on a tributary of the Platte River. It has a nature and visitor centre and offers VIP experiences. Rowe dates back to 1974, has public tours and is expanding its visitor centre.
Both help protect and preserve critical habitat. Both built camouflaged viewing blinds into the riverbanks and manage birders with rules.
You can't use a flash or rapid-fire shooting mode. Cellphones must be in airplane mode with screen lights turned down. At dawn, you must stay quiet and wait until the sun comes up before taking pictures. At dusk, you can talk quietly and take photos until the sun starts to set and the birds need to settle.
“Be careful — this is contagious,” warns Pamela Bergmann, a Rowe volunteer from Alaska. “Folks ask what I like better — the morning blinds or the evening blinds. The answer is whatever one I'm doing because they're both very different.”
It's -6 C (-13 C with the wind chill) and I'm grateful that Rowe's redesigned blinds have warming rooms.
We learn that crane fossils found in Nebraska date the migration back nine million years, long before there were corn fields or even a Platte River.
While cranes are hunted in the U.S. and Canada, Nebraska has always forbidden it. The overall economic impact of the migration was US$14.3 million in 2017. The Crane Trust and Rowe brought in 46,500 visitors that year.
Brad Mellema, executive director of Grand Island Tourism, remembers doing his first overnight crane photography tour in the late 1990s in a makeshift blind. Rowe “scaled the experience up,” and a coffee-table book and TV documentary popularized it.
“Things really started gaining traction in the early 2000s,” remembers Mellema, who has united the competing crane businesses at nebraskaflyway.com. He introduces us to Chad Giddeon, a duck hunter and farmer who runs the Crane Cabin Retreat.
“Cranes being here signifies spring coming and it has since I was a kid,” says Giddeon.
Visit Kearney's executive director Roger Jasnoch says cranes attract three kinds of people.
“Streakers, students and strollers,” Jasnoch explains. “Streakers drive around and see the cranes just from the comfort of their dashboard. Students are the ones that stay overnight and rent a viewpoint that you stay in overnight in a four-by-four-by-eight-foot box. Strollers — that's what we will do this evening.”
Over four days, I gain a new appreciation for what cranes and other migratory creatures endure.
I see them at sunrise flying in front of a sun dog (think rainbows but when the air is filled with ice crystals). I watch them at sunset while drinking wine (another VIP perk). On that last morning, the one with the frisky whoopers, it warms up enough to finally take off my coat.