March 2026 • Nebraskaland 33
well as 170 whooping cranes during his
career. One might think that with more
than 1 million cranes stopping on the
Platte during the migration, trapping
enough to deploy 20 transmitters for
the study would be easy. But that was
not the case.
"They live 30-plus years in the wild,
and they have incredible eyesight and
incredible hearing," Brandt said. "So
it's hard to outsmart them, sometimes,
even though there's a lot of them.
You've got to be in the right place
at the right time and not get busted
by them."
Cranes are much easier to trap
in their wintering grounds, where
Brandt says food can be a limiting
factor, making it possible to get them
"addicted to bait."
"That's one of the difficulties here
is these birds do not really respond to
corn or bait, because they have corn ad
libitum," he said. "Everywhere they go
is a cornfield, right?"
The team was able to capture three
lesser sandhill cranes and two juveniles
that are likely greaters. Each was fitted
with a solar-powered tracker built in a
leg band weighing just 2.3 ounces. The
trackers are programmed to record a
data point every five minutes within
the Platte River Valley and every 15
minutes elsewhere. They also contain
an accelerometer, which measures
speed and direction, and collect more
points when the birds are in flight.
This allows them to record behaviors,
such as kettling, which leaves a spiral
trail of dots as the birds circle to their
cruising altitude.
The trackers also record fewer
points when battery life is low. During
extended cloudy periods, they also
quit recording. That was the case with
the crane that nested in Siberia: It
flew through Alaska when wildfires
filled the air with smoke. Through Nov.
12, that crane's tracker had recorded
201,000 points, compared to 485,000
for a crane that nested in Ontario.
Sandhill cranes take flight from a corn field in Hall County. The Crane Trust's project will help better understand where the
birds are feeding during their stopover on the Platte River during the spring.
