You don’t need to travel far to witness one of nature’s greatest migrations. Just take a short road trip to Fort Kearny State Historical Park in Nebraska, where this month, around one million Sandhill Cranes are passing through an 80-mile stretch of the Platte River on the way to their northern nesting grounds in Alaska, Canada and Siberia.
It’s a near-5,000-mile journey the birds make every spring, and one that Jim Pease, emeritus associate professor of natural resource ecology and management at Iowa State University, likens to the great migrations of African wildebeest and zebra.
“This is just as good... it's just a different critter," he said. "There are hundreds of thousands of cranes that come through here and seeing them en masse here in a 90-mile stretch of Nebraska is just phenomenal. It's a special place."
Sandhill Cranes are one of Earth’s oldest bird species. They’ve made their annual migration for thousands of years, and the history of cranes in Nebraska goes back even further — with fossils of their ancestors found in the state dating back as far as 10 million years.
The gray Sandhill Cranes stand at about four feet tall and have a bright reddish patch right above their long beaks. They nest in wetlands and marshes on piles of vegetation that they construct. Their stop in Nebraska marks the largest gathering of cranes in the world, with approximately 80% of the entire species arriving there at some point during their journey.
They feed in nearby fields during the day and roost in the river overnight in huge blocks that visitors come from far and wide to see.
Much of the land they stay on is maintained by The Crane Trust, which Wildlife Biologist Bethany Ostrum says protects nearly 10,000 acres of lowland tall grass prairie and wet meadows along the central Platte River.
“We manage the land to essentially reflect what was here hundreds of years ago, before agriculture really changed the shape of the landscape," she said.
The native prairies and wet meadow systems alongside the river make the perfect conditions for the Sandhill Cranes — and even the occasional endangered Whooping Crane — to make their stop. Without this habitat, the cranes would not have an adequate place to rest and refuel on their migrations, eventually causing their numbers to decline.
The Crane Trust is also tasked with monitoring the crane population. They conduct aerial surveys in a fixed-wing plane once a week for ten weeks during the migration, flying low along the river to count Sandhill Cranes as well as Whooping Cranes, American White Pelicans, Trumpeter Swans and dark geese populations. Ostrum recently counted 429,000 Sandhill Cranes in the span of about an hour.
“The population is increasing," she said. "There was a time in the 1800s, early 1900s, that the population of Sandhill Cranes was in dire straits. It wasn't as bad as the Whooping Crane, which got down to like around 20 birds at one point, but there's record of people being worried that the Sandhill Crane was going to go extinct. There's been some discussion as to whether the survey methods have just gotten more accurate or efficient, or if the population has really been increasing as rapidly as the numbers say, but I remember it was 1990, people were saying there was 400,000 or 500,000 Sandhill Cranes."
Today, it's estimated that there are 1.5 million Sandhill Cranes around the world, and of that population, Ostrum says 1.3 million journey through the Nebraska flyway. At any one time during the migration period, there may be as many as 500,000 cranes stopping over at the river.
Their numbers peak in mid-March. The cranes will remain at the Platte River until around mid-April.
