MU group greets crane flock
Published March 20, 2007
Zach Fleer swings his binoculars up to his sharp gray eyes and squints through the double barrels. He's standing on a bridge above a narrow river in the middle of Nebraska.
It's a Saturday; the date is March 10. It's cool and windy. The sun is setting.
In the binoculars, Fleer sees a few loosely organized waves of sandhill cranes. They're gliding toward him. About a thousand.
And they're getting closer.
Fleer is a junior fisheries and wildlife major at MU. His red hair, curling out from under his Cardinals cap, is rustling in the wind.
He's one of about 30 MU students on a weekend-long bird-watching trip.
Half of the students with Fleer are in his ornithology class, and the rest study journalism — they've come to document the trip.
The cranes are coming closer. They're going to swoop right overhead, then land on the river. It's going to be loud, and memorable, and everyone will be telling mom about it on the long ride home.
The cranes haven't picked this river randomly. This is the Platte River, just outside of Kearney, Neb. This is their legendary pit stop. Every spring, more than half a million of the cranes drop in here. They spend a few weeks roosting on the river before continuing their annual northbound migration.
They do two things every day they're here: At sunrise, they swish up and leave the river to feed (on corn, mostly). At sunset, they come swooshing back for a spot to stand where they can sleep overnight.
Whenever they move, it's a spectacle. And that's what brought Fleer and his group to Kearney.
The cranes are getting closer and lower. Fleer is watching. Closer. Closer.
At the last minute they head south.
"That was just a little bit strange," Fleer said. "It was so many of them, just seeing them flying and hearing them. I thought they would be landing down the river here, but maybe later."
It wasn't as bad for Julia Shuck, who's a few feet away from Fleer. As a freshman agricultural journalism major, Shuck decided to come along to experience nature. So for her, the sight was better than nothing.
"It's kind of neat, seeing all the birds," she said.
But it was better for the hardcore birders.
"It was awe-inspiring," said Andrew Cox, a 32-year-old doctoral candidate in biology. "The moment when they all flew over, you could hear their wings flapping, and you could hear the calls."
Amber Wiewel, a first-year senior fisheries and wildlife major who confesses to living in her own little bird world, was not as wordy.
She takes a second to think, then spouts just one word: "Awesome."
In the blind
The next morning, Shuck is waiting around in a long wooden room.
The room is called a blind, and it's designed for crane-watching. It breathes through several cutouts at different heights in the wall facing the river. But Shuck can't see anything through the holes because it's dark out. It's 6 a.m., and the hard and brisk Nebraska air whirs through the cutouts.
But she's not alone; she's with some of the other students in the blind at Rowe Bird Sanctuary, but not all of them.
The journalism students chose to pay the $20 required to witness the takeoff from a blind at Rowe, but most ornithology students declined, choosing instead to sleep in and save a few bucks.
Fleer, for example, is fast asleep. So is Cox.
But Shuck and others are up. Because it's still dark, all they can do now is listen.
And they hear a few cranes.
The voices' volume, bass and treble are increasing. And the dark is vanishing. Shuck can make out a few little dark-flecked needles about 30 feet away.
Minutes later, it's a few shades lighter outside. The needles, it's now clear, are beaks. But nothing more.
Then it happens: Six black somethings flap their wings, heading up and east.
But the beaks 30 feet away stay still.
This surprises some students because usually when a few cranes start flying, they all do.
It's getting lighter outside. The dark has turned bluish gray.
Shuck can see many more cranes now. They're lined up, beak after beak, like soldiers about to march into battle. And more cranes are calling. They're waking up.
Fifteen minutes later, it's more obvious why so many people come here to see this.
When the cranes finally take off, the earth shakes. The flapping of their wings sounds like a rustling of many pages.
Their calls are as loud and rowdy as a crowd of fans at a football game, rooting in tones high and low.
"It's its own sound," Julia said, looking through her binoculars.
She doesn't even bother to look away; she's mesmerized.
They're flying in circles, swirling up, more and more of them, peppering the sky.
It's mad and hectic, like the students are surrounded by bees and could get stung anywhere at any moment.
The departure endures for about a half an hour until the volunteer, Alan Bartels, breaks in. He mentions the CraneCam.
If you log onto National Geographic's Web site, he said, you can watch the CraneCam, a Webcam streaming live the action at the Platte.
It gives Web surfers an idea about what it's like to be near the cranes, but for Bartels, it's just not the same as being there first-hand. There's no comparison.
"Technology can only show you so much," he said. "You have to get away from your computer, and get out into the elements and see it for yourself."
Too bad Fleer is sleeping. This morning's show easily trumped what he saw on the bridge last night. He would have loved this.
He'll just have to watch the CraneCam.