26 Nebraskaland • March 2024
a strange sound or the call of alert
birds gave warning. Birds on their
bellies sometimes simply lifted their
heads when alerted. Other times, they
were on their feet in a split second
in an eff ortless motion, unlike their
lumbering eff orts to lie down, and
much quicker than what Helzer had
seen in their videos.
"That was like watching some kind
of robot that hasn't been perfected
yet," he said.
The birds left en masse late in the
afternoon on my fi rst visit, presumably
startled by something. They stayed
into the evening on the second,
leaving in bunches until the last of
them departed an hour before sunset,
heading to the fi elds and meadows one
last time before returning to their river
roost.
In the Woods
More than 1 million sandhill cranes
stop along central Platte River each
spring. They are most often seen
roosting on the widest, most open,
segments of the river at night, and
feeding and loafi ng in wide-open crop
fi elds and wet meadows during the day.
There are fi ve subspecies of sandhill
cranes in North America. Two, the
lesser and greater, are migratory.
These are the birds we see in Nebraska,
all heading from their wintering
grounds in the southern United States
and Mexico to their breeding grounds
scattered across the northern U.S.,
Canada, Alaska and into Siberia.
Among the two migratory subspecies
are four breeding populations, each
with their own habitat preferences.
The common view that cranes only
use open spaces was adopted because
many of the birds that stop here do.
Cranes loaf in the creekbottom, most resting on their feet with some lying on the ground.
