Wings across the Plains

As noted in yesterday's post on the annual Sandhill Crane migration, about 500,000 of these large birds pause here in Nebraska for several weeks before their final push northward. After taking yesterday's photo in a cornfield along the Platte River, we moved on to the Fort Kearney hiking/biking bridge across the Platte. And there we waited, on a very cold day, to watch the many waves of crane flocks sailing in overhead as they set down for their evening roost along the sandbars. If you enlarge the picture, you may notice several threads or ribbons of crane formations as they were coming in by the thousands from a day of feeding in nearby cornfields. The calls, whoops and chatter coming from such large numbers for so long, so close overhead, was a memorable "chilling" experience

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