No Other River

Abstract

It's an annual rite. Sometime between late February and early April, I drive west on Interstate 80. In south-central Nebraska, both the Platte River and the interstate swing low toward the Nebraska-Kansas state line. Somewhere along the bottom of this catenary curve, I pull off the interstate and drive gravel roads south of the river. What I'm looking for is the world's largest gathering of migrating sandhill cranes. They're easy to find. The half-million cranes are concentrated, more or less, within the forty-mile stretch of the river between Grand Island and Kearney, the narrow waist on the hourglass-shaped Central Flyway and the narrowest part of the crane's migratory route. Because this part of Nebraska is relatively flat and open, one doesn't have to look hard or far to see the elegant, leggy, four-foot tall, red-capped, gray birds. I come to watch them feast and dance and drop out of and rise into the sky. Most of the cranes congregating on the Platte are lesser sandhills, the crane with the longest migration. The remaining cranes are greater sandhills and the endangered whooping cranes. After the roughly 600-mile trip from their winter homes in eastern New Mexico, northwestern Texas, and northern Mexico, the sandhill cranes are lean and hungry. Once in Nebraska, they glean corn left from the harvest and slurp up snails, worms, grubs, insects, snakes, and crayfish in the wet meadows near the Platte. Each crane stays in Nebraska about four weeks and adds a pound or so of fat during this time. At night, they return to the shallow river where they sleep standing in water, usually on one leg in roosts of as many as 10,000 to 15,000 cranes per half mile of river. From the air, these sleeping masses, some of which are a mile long, look sandbar-shaped, and the individual cranes are evenly spaced, as if, writes Steve Grooms in The Cry of the Sandhill Crane, positioned on a grid of four-foot squares, each bird staying just beyond the reach of its neighbors' sharp bills. At dawn, the cranes head for the fields near the river. And there, they dance, bowing, strutting, pumping their heads, raising their bills, flapping their wings, tossing corncobs into the air, and gracefully hopping as high as twenty feet. Great bouncing