January-February 2022 • Nebraskaland 31
Platte River Recovery Implementation
Program.
Those flights had documented 11
other whoopers on the Platte that
day, including eight at the National
Audubon Society's Lillian Annette
Rowe Sanctuary near Gibbon and
three more on Platte River Recovery
Implementation Program property.
That single day count of 57, repeated
each day Nov. 3-8, was an all-time high
on the Platte, topping the previous
record of 35 from the spring of 2018
and smashing the previous fall record
of 20 in 2019.
The count was roughly 11 percent
of the 506 birds in the migratory
population that breeds at Wood
Buffalo National Park in Canada and
winters in Texas, following a 200-mile-
wide migration route between those
areas.
A day earlier, the same group of
46 whoopers, representing every bird
crews had spotted on the 20 miles of
river between Shelton and Doniphan,
were spotted in a nearby cornfield.
Mallory Jaymes, a biologist who
coordinates the survey flights for
Headwaters, said the first whooping
cranes to arrive in Nebraska on their
southward migration this fall were
A group of 46 whooping cranes, the
largest ever recorded on the Platte
River in central Nebraska, forage on
the river downstream of the South
Alda Road bridge, as a fl ock of
sandhill cranes fl ies overhead on
Nov. 7, 2021.
