Five Hundred Thousand Wings on the Platte

Every spring, the Platte River in central Nebraska does something that has no modern parallel anywhere in North American ornithology.

Approximately five hundred thousand sandhill cranes, representing roughly eighty percent of the world's sandhill crane population, converge on a forty-mile stretch of the river's shallow braided channel between mid-February and early April. They have flown from wintering grounds in New Mexico and Texas, and they are heading for breeding grounds in Canada, Alaska, and Siberia. The Platte is their fueling stop, and they use it with a precision that suggests the river has been part of their migration route for a very long time.

They arrive by the thousands as the sun goes down, calling to each other in a sound that carries for miles. They roost in the shallow channels overnight, where the open water protects them from predators. At dawn, they lift off in waves that block the light.

The river's suitability for cranes is partly the result of earlier agricultural irrigation that reduced the Platte's flow and created the shallow braided character the cranes require. The irrigation that elsewhere diminished the Platte here created something the cranes had needed all along.

The Iain Nicolson Audubon Center at Rowe Sanctuary near Gibbon, Nebraska, provides the primary public observation infrastructure. Peak concentration runs through mid-March. The cranes do not know they are an attraction. They are simply stopping, as they have always stopped, because the river is there.