GIBBON, Neb. (CN) — Before dawn on a recent Friday, thousands of sandhill cranes stood on long spindly legs in the shallow waters of the Platte River. Squawking and chortling, the flock hit unique notes that only these cranes can sound.
As the sun rose, the flock seemed to stretch down the river for at least a quarter of a mile.
A short distance to the south, around a dozen tourists waited with cameras ready in a bird blind at Rowe Sanctuary.
Suddenly, a bald eagle swooped down, landing on a sandbar and spooking the cranes. The flock lifted into the sky, spiraling in the air as they moved east.
Visiting from Winston-Salem, North Carolina, tourist Leesa Goodson aimed her camera. She had a special 150/400 lens made for bird photography.
“I not only got a picture of them going up, I also got a shot of two bald eagles,” Goodson beamed later in an interview with Courthouse News. “Some people were disappointed that they lifted so early, but it was so fantastic to watch.”
Every year in March and April, Nebraska plays host to one of the world’s most remarkable migrations, as roughly one million sandhill cranes flock here from Texas, New Mexico and Mexico on their way north to Canada, Alaska and Siberia.
Around 80% of them stay within just a roughly 75-mile span of central Nebraska’s Platte River Valley, according to the Nature Conservancy. The squawking visitors stay for weeks, bringing millions of tourist dollars to this region and helping make the Cornhusker State “America’s Serengeti,” as John Van Gundy, a volunteer here, put it.
As the sandhill cranes arrive, so too do the bird lovers. At another blind downriver was Lauren Bailey.
A cousin of Goodson, Bailey splits her time between Nevada and Nebraska. She’d agreed to meet her in the Cornhusker State for a crane-watching vacation at Rowe Sanctuary.
The flock of cranes soon passed by as they fled from the bald eagle. “You just see a swarm of birds coming at you, and it just [keeps] coming,” Bailey said. “Honestly, for the first time seeing it, it was really dramatic. I think both of us came away with a real appreciation for this.”
With widths in the hundreds of feet and depths of only around 8 inches in many places, the Platte River is a perfect pit stop for the sandhill crane, which has an affinity for shallow water.
Shallow water is a key characteristic of the Platte River — and indeed, maps of sandhill crane migration routes resemble an hourglass, as cranes converge on this region before spreading out again as they continue north.
As the sun sets, flocks of the mighty birds camp out on the Platte. They roost standing up on and between sandbars in the river.
The river works like a home-security system, its waters giving off an audible warning if a predator approaches. “The minute a coyote steps into that river, you’ll hear the alarm call [and] they’re gone,” said Van Gundy, the Rowe Sanctuary volunteer.
Crane numbers in Nebraska peak around mid-to-late March. Each crane spends about 29 days there, increasing their body weight by around 20% during their stay.
They feed in nearby fields, storing up nutrition for the long flight north and eating calcium that they’ll later use to produce strong eggshells. They flip over cowpies to pick at grubs, just as they once did with buffalo dung.
“They eat the waste corn, which is good,” volunteer Diane Anderson of Shoreview, Minnesota, said, explaining how the birds benefit agriculture in the area. All that feasting “frees up the ground for the new seeds.”
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