Sandhill Crane Migration

Dressed warmly for the cold night, we are lined up at dusk at the open windows of a bird blind in Nebraska. We are quiet except for the occasional cough, sniff, or swish of polyester sleeves. The Platte River isn’t deep, only a foot or so in many places. It’s one of the reasons it’s an ideal place for the traveling cranes to nest at night. They sleep in the water and on sand bars. It gives them the ability to spot predators with their excellent vision.

As a pale line of red fades at the edge of the sky, the cranes started coming in to nest for the night. The clouds above the water lay bars of blue and white across the sky, a path for the undulating lines of cranes, like notes on a page, or bars of music on a sound machine, going up and down, joined at the edges and from above by more and more cranes.

The birds call to each other, an uptilted questioning sound with a coo at the end. Baby birds fly with their parents and they call to keep track of each other as they fly. Cranes mate for life. The female is a mare and the male is a roan. The babies are colts. They lay one or two eggs, and both parents feed the hatchlings for a month or so until the babies can fend for themselves.

We're here because my son-in-law David was reading a book about Jane Goodall (a pioneer of gorilla research) and she mentioned that observing the Sandhill Crane migration was one of the coolest things she's ever seen. The Audubon Society offers guided bird tours at Rowe Sanctuary in Nebraska, so we booked flights to Omaha last weekend.

As it gets darker, the flocks of flying cranes get larger. It sounds at times like an arriving train, and then like chanting, a stadium crowd stamping and hooting to get singers back out on stage for one last song. They estimate 500,000 to 700,000 cranes rest and fatten up in Nebraska before continuing their long journey on to Alaska, Canada, and even as far as Siberia. It was incredible to see. Go sometime, if you can.