We head out in Johnsgard’s green Subaru Outback, which is
crammed with photo equipment, Goodwill-style sleeping bags,
jackets, and boots, and cracker crumbs. A nasty crack loops across
the windshield.
A few miles west of Lincoln, the land rises and falls in broad,
gentle swells, flatter than the Palouse hills but high enough,
Johnsgard says, to make gravity-fed irrigation unfeasible. Since
pioneer days, these fields had been home to dryland agriculture,
primarily a modest crop of corn.
Invention of center-pivot irrigators in the early 1960s enabled
farmers to irrigate the rolling fields. That, along with extensive
use of fertilizers that began after World War II, catapulted
Nebraska into the top three corn-producing states in the country.
More corn production meant more kernels left on the ground after
harvest, and more food for the cranes. A survey in the 1940s
estimated about 40,000 sandhill cranes migrated through the Platte
valley each spring. By the 1960s, that number had grown to 150,000;
and by the late 1990s, to half a million or more.
During the same period, dams and drawdowns of the Platte
eliminated the spring floods that had historically scoured the
river’s sandbars free of woody sprouts. The cranes, which crowd
onto the sandbars at night, lost their roosting spots. Fortunately,
the area is also critical habitat for three birds on the Endangered
Species List—whooping cranes, piping plovers, and the inland race
of the least tern. To protect the endangered birds, sandbars in the
50-mile stretch between Kearney and Grand Island are kept clear of
brush by a yearly scraping with bulldozers. Sandhill cranes, along
with waterfowl and other shore birds, have been incidental
beneficiaries.
We exit I-80 and drive south on the Tom Osborne Expressway,
named for the former football coach. Johnsgard laughs. “I don’t
think there will ever be a Johnsgard Expressway,” he says. “A
Johnsgard Back Alley, maybe.”
We cross the Platte and turn onto a road that parallels the
river. Redwinged blackbirds—just males, here before the females to
stake out breeding territories—are everywhere. A merlin on a power
line scans the ground for mice. Every field seems to have a
red-tailed hawk soaring overhead.
Nebraska got hammered by a blizzard a week ago, and Johnsgard is
pleased to see snow still in the furrows. The fog-colored cranes
show up beautifully against the patches of white. He veers from one
side of the road to the other to get a better look. He says that in
all his years of gawking at birds from his car, he’s never had an
accident, except for running off the road a few times.
 A sandhill crane leaps into the air. Photo by Paul Johnsgard.
We stop to watch a few dozen cranes amid the corn stubble.
Meadows wet with snowmelt and spring rains are almost as important
for the cranes as sandbars. The long-billed birds rummage in the
muddy soil to find snails and other meaty sources of protein. We
see some cranes probing so deeply they’re up to their eyeballs in
mud. Here and there a crane stops feeding and hops. Its neighbors
catch the impulse, and soon several cranes are dancing. One bounces
up and down a few times. Another jumps several feet into the air,
its bill reaching toward the sky. A third hops, fluffs, picks up a
chunk of cornstalk and flings it into the air as it jumps. Then
they settle back to the serious business of eating.
A new pair floats in from the west. They tilt sideways, a
maneuver Johnsgard says reduces lift and slows them down. As the
cranes flutter down, they lower their spindly legs toward the
ground. Landing is a soft, graceful affair, as is almost everything
I see these birds do.
The cranes will stay in the area for a few weeks before moving
on. It only takes them a day to get here from their winter homes in
Texas and New Mexico, so they’re usually in pretty good shape when
they arrive; but they need to pack on another couple of pounds of
fat in order to complete their migration. Many of them nest in
northern Canada; some will travel all the way to Siberia.
We turn north, cross the river again, and pull into the lot at
the Nebraska Bird Observatory. The center’s director, Heidi Hughes,
worked as press secretary for U.S. representative Don Bonker (D,
Washington) in the 1980s. She says she sought the job because she
liked Bonker’s stance on environmental issues.
“And you’re still doing environmental work,” I say.
“Wildlife,” she corrects me. “I work for wildlife.” Too many
people in the environmental movement are too strident for her, she
explains. “I want to be positive, not preachy.”
It’s an attitude shared by Johnsgard. Despite his concern for
the river and the birds, his public persona is decidedly low-key.
He writes opinion pieces for newspapers and sends letters to
congresspeople, but has testified before the Nebraska legislature
only once.
“I try to avoid standing up and doing that kind of thing,” he
says. “I think I can be more efficient reaching people through my
writing.”
That’s why the great prairie chicken battle of 2000 surprised
everyone. When the state announced a lottery to award 300 permits
to hunt prairie chickens in an area where Johnsgard feared the
population couldn’t bear such pressure, he called on non-hunters to
apply for the permits.
“Game and Parks of course never figured that anyone would apply
for those permits who wasn’t intending to shoot the hell out of
prairie chickens,” he says. Game and Parks figured wrong; about a
third of the permits went to people who promptly tossed them in the
trash. The state has since offered only very limited hunting in the
area.
It was one victory in a long, mostly losing struggle. Hughes
thinks prairie ecosystems like the Platte valley are in trouble,
with less than 1 percent of the original acreage remaining, because
most people have no personal connection to them. Although
homesteaders and amber waves of grain are part of our national
self-image, she says, few Americans have the kind of direct
experience with the prairie that would make them care deeply about
it.
“You have to sit in the fields and listen to the bobolinks and
meadowlarks. You have to see the cranes,” she says. “When you get
the shivers, you don’t need to be told the habitat is
important.”
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