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by Cherie Winner
photography by Joel Sartore
Paul Johnsgard is obsessed with birds. He studies them, writes
about them, draws them, photographs them, carves wooden sculptures
of them, and talks about them with anyone who will listen. He won’t
mind me calling him obsessed. He uses the term himself.
Just don’t call him a “birder.”
“I like the term ‘birdwatching,’” says Johnsgard. “It sounds
like you’re actually watching them, not just checking them off a
list.”
Johnsgard, who earned his master’s degree in wildlife biology at
Washington State College in 1955 and taught biology at the
University of Nebraska-Lincoln for 40 years, actually watches them.
He has a knack for finding things other observers have missed, or
dismissed. Most famously, Johnsgard brought attention to the
sandhill cranes that pour into the Platte River valley every spring
on their way to breeding grounds in the far north. Others had seen
the congregation of cranes, of course, but it was Johnsgard’s 1982
book Those of the Gray Wind that made the rest of the world
take notice. Since then central Nebraska has become a springtime
travel mecca, as 40,000 “bird tourists” flock to the Platte valley
every year to see the show.
This year, I am one of those bird tourists. When I contacted
Johnsgard about an interview, he suggested I come to Nebraska in
late March. That way I could see the cranes.
He’s arranged for us to stay at a cabin along the Platte owned
by a friend and former student. Photographer Joel Sartore will meet
us there, as will a film crew from Nebraska public television.
Johnsgard is in demand during crane season, and he’s doubling up on
interviews.
While in Lincoln, we visit some of his favorite haunts, reaching
most of them by foot. Other observers have said Johnsgard’s gangly
appearance reminds them of a crane. The comparison holds, but only
when he’s standing still. In motion the resemblance disappears.
Cranes step delicately, cautiously. Johnsgard strides. Fast.
Scrambling to keep up with him, I wonder that his health setbacks—a
heart attack in 1985 and a stroke in the late 90s—haven’t slowed
him down. Then it occurs to me: maybe they have.
He takes me to the Nebraska State Museum, where we admire fossil
mammoths and mastodons that were unearthed from Nebraska fields. We
run into the museum’s director in the hall; she says an exhibit he
helped organize, of another artist’s bird paintings, is bringing a
lot of new visitors into the building. We go to a nature center at
the city’s Pioneers Park, where Johnsgard drops off copies of a
spiral-bound nature guide he just finished—a “pseudo-book,” he
calls it. We go to the Great Plains Art Center, which is closed for
the installation of a new show, but Johnsgard calls ahead to get us
in. The director shows me some of Johnsgard’s drawings that are
part of a traveling exhibit on the natural history of the Lewis and
Clark expedition. Invoking the “six degrees of separation” mantra,
he recalls that a few months after he and Johnsgard met, they got
to talking and realized that the director’s mother received
life-saving cancer treatment from a doctor in Phoenix who had been
a student of Johnsgard’s. We go to Bluestem Books, a cramped
cluster of rooms in a brick storefront under a viaduct, whose
owners have just bought the remainders of one of Johnsgard’s books.
As soon as we step through the door, Johnsgard is rushed by a short
mop of a dog. “That’s Diego,” the woman at the counter tells me.
“He lives for Paul’s visits.”
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