Cranes are among the oldest living birds on the planet. Fossil records place sandhill cranes in Nebraska more than nine million years ago, long before there was a Platte River, which, by comparison, is only a youthful 10,000 years old. The landscape then was savanna-like, and its inhabitants were more like that of modern East Africa; varieties of rhinos, camels and elephants long since extinct. Yet cranes survived and watched as American bison, pronghorn and wapiti evolved on the prairies. Humans now dominate the landscape, having replaced the bison with cattle and the prairie with corn and concrete.
Every spring Nebraska’s central Platte River valley hosts one the most remarkable wildlife spectacles in North America and the largest gatherings of cranes in the world. From mid-February through early April about half a million sandhill cranes stage here, feeding in cornfields and wet meadows by day and roosting in the shallow flowing waters of the Platte River at night. The central Platte River is important to sandhill cranes and other migratory birds because it serves as a key stopover site where birds rest and store energy to continue their northward migration and subsequently breed. Sandhill cranes that stop in Nebraska spread out as they continue north and their breeding range extends across the northern United States, Canada and even Siberia.
This piece was created from a photograph depicting the beauty, brilliance and elegance of the sandhill crane that God created.
