The Braided Platte and the Cranes

Every March, the skies over south-central Nebraska fill with a sound that is difficult to describe unless you have heard it before. It begins as a low, rolling resonance from somewhere to the south, then it builds, and within a few minutes the horizon is dark with birds. Sandhill cranes. Half a million of them, more or less, arriving from Texas and Mexico and the Gulf Coast, funneling toward an eighty-mile stretch of the Platte River between Kearney and Grand Island.

No other place on earth concentrates this many cranes at once. The staging ground is the Platte, and what makes the Platte usable is its shape. This is a braided river, wide and shallow and broken into dozens of shifting channels by sandbars that migrate with every flood. A conventional river, with a single deep channel lined by trees, would be useless to cranes. They need open sight lines to watch for predators, and they need to stand in water at night to rest safely. The braided Platte gives them both.

The birds eat corn. The Platte Valley is one of the most intensively farmed river corridors in North America, and the cranes fuel themselves on waste grain left in the fields after harvest. In roughly three weeks, a crane will put on a good deal of weight on the Platte before continuing north to breeding grounds in Canada, Alaska, and Siberia. The river is, in the simplest terms, a fuel depot for one of the longest migrations on earth.

The cranes have used this corridor for thousands of years, but the braided character of the river has narrowed since the early nineteen hundreds as irrigation withdrawals, reservoirs, and riparian vegetation have reduced flow. Conservation groups have spent decades clearing willows and cottonwoods from critical roosting bars to restore the open-water character the birds require.

In early March, if you pull over on a gravel road south of Kearney near dusk, you will hear the river before you see it.