Are We in Kansas Yet?

When things get dreary in the North country, some people head for Puerta Vallarta, others for Costa Rica, New Orleans, or Palm Springs. A while back, just when the huge mounds of snow on either side of the driveway were beginning to settle, Hilary and I got in our little Corolla and headed south — for Kansas.

That's not exactly true. Kansas City (Missouri) had been an object of interest for quite a long time. It's a "classic" American city, it isn't that far away, ... and we'd never been there. I mentioned to my well-traveled cousin Pat that we were thinking of visiting Kansas City, and she said, "Why?" Our friend Dave stops overnight there on his annual Christmas trip north from Texas, so I asked him what he thought of Kansas City.

"It's a city," he replied.

Those ringing endorsements were not quite enough to spur us to action. Then one morning, as I was sitting here at my desk, trying to keep my winning percentage at cribbage above 68 percent, Hilary brought me an article from the Star-Tribune travel section about the sandhill crane migration through east central Nebraska.

It's an event we'd been meaning to take in for many years. But Kearney is 500 miles away, it requires some advance planning to book one of the blinds that give you the best views, and the weather is likely to be dreadful way out there in the flat, wind-swept prairie in late March—maybe worse than here!

But now we had a different plan. Drive out to Kearney, then head south and east to Kansas City. While we were at it, why not stop in Red Cloud, Nebraska, where the novelist Willa Cather grew up? From there we could continue south and east through the Flint Hills—the largest remaining tallgrass prairie in the U.S., by far—and slip effortlessly into Kansas City after spending the night in Manhattan, Kansas, where the Konza Prairie and the Flint Hills Discovery Center are located.

One corner of Omaha's Old Market district

If we had more time, I'd dilate on the impressive street sculpture in Sioux Falls and the lively Old Market neighborhood in Omaha—eight blocks of warehouse docks, restaurants of every persuasion, bars, hotels, and even a well-stocked used book store. It makes you a little sad, being there, to think how our own Minneapolis "warehouse district" has been largely ruined by hi-rise condos, valet parking, and expense-account restaurants.

We didn't reach Grand Island until our third day on the road. Early afternoon. (We'd spent a little time that morning at the Fontenelle Forest Wildlife Refuge just south of Omaha before leaving town). It's here, in the fifty-mile stretch between Grand Island and Kearney, that many, many cranes stop to feed in the cornfields for a few days, breaking their long journey from Mexico to their Arctic breeding grounds. You can't help seeing them alongside the freeway. Lots of them.

How many? It's hard to say. One field might contain 500 birds. The next will have none. Then you'll see 300 on a grassy piece of land lining a freeway ditch. There's no way to count them from a car, and there's no good reason to do so, either, but the numbers soon become staggering.

The day before we arrived, the local crane foundation that makes a scientific estimate of the numbers using aircraft reached a new total. Their best guess was that 659,870 Sandhill Cranes—plus or minus 61,378—were in the area. This eclipsed the previous record by 60,000 cranes, which they attributed to the fact that the recent flooding and cold weather had delayed a lot of birds.

Weeks earlier, when we started to cook up this adventure, all the blinds in the area were already booked, but I'd managed to secure a spot on the pedestrian bridge across the Platte River behind the Crane Trust Center for the evening of March 27. We pulled in about 2 p.m., let them know we were there, and spent the rest of the afternoon wandering the sandy backroads of the region looking at cranes as we made our way west to Kearney, where I'd booked a room not far from the river.

But it seems I'd made a logistical mistake. Kearney is 50 miles from Grand Island. We'd have to drive the same distance back to the Crane Center that evening, and then return to the motel in the dark.

You may be wondering why anyone would want to book a spot on a pedestrian bridge across the Platte River. It's because at sundown all the cranes that have been feeding in the field congregate at the river to spend the night on one of its many sandy islands, safe from predators.

This is the big show. Yes, the sight of ten thousand elegant gray birds spread out across five hundred acres of corn stubble is impressive. But seeing these same birds descend en masse at dusk, wheeling and squawking, onto a sandbar no bigger than a football field, is something else again. And just when you think the island is packed, another "dance" shows up and insinuates itself effortlessly into the throng. (I looked it up: a big flock of cranes is called a dance. I've never heard anyone say that, however.)

We arrived back at the crane center an hour before the scheduled lecture and milled around with other enthusiasts looking at maps and informative kiosks. One elderly woman wearing on official-looking vest—knowledgeable and eager to share—gave us a bit of advice. "Don't leave the bridge too early. A lot of the birds come in at night. They'll swoop right over your head."

I mentioned in passing that we have cranes all over the place in Minnesota and western Wisconsin, though not in such extravagant numbers, and she said, "Your cranes are a different subspecies. They look the same but they're bigger."

The woman also mentioned that it was perhaps more exciting to see the cranes lift off in the morning, because they didn't just dribble off, but departed all together by the thousands. And the best place to watch that event was the Ft. Kearney footbridge, which happened to be quite close to our distant motel. 

After listening to an introductory lecture at the crane center, we walked out to the footbridge an hour before sundown. It was a glorious evening—the first of the year for us. Shirtsleeve weather. A golden sunset. Small flocks of cranes drifted by in the distance, high overhead, crossing the river at random in both directions. We stood alongside maybe forty people, most of them elderly, many of them sans binoculars, chatting in small groups with strangers or with the young biology students who had accompanied us as informal guides.

No birds, just sky and clouds

Through binoculars I could see a lot of birds in the fields a few hundred yards downstream, but more than an hour passed—a pleasant, idle, anticipatory hour—before three daring cranes emerged from the corn to occupy one of the distant sandbars, roughly the size of a rowboat. I could see other birds "dancing" along the bank of the river at the edge of the cornfield, lifting their wings high and prancing gracefully from leg to leg.

A few minutes later eight or ten birds joined the avant garde on the postage-stamp island. Soon a movement was under way to seize the nearer sandbar, which might have been the size of a school bus. Before long birds began to arrive on the nearer piece of sand twenty or thirty at a time. By this time the squawking had become loud and joyous, but the sun had set and it was getting dark. A great avian movement was underway, but we could barely see it. That might have added to the awesome mystery of the event. 

Birds begin to arrive on the nearer island

No sooner had I said to myself, that island is full, than another shadowy cloud of two hundred birds would arrive and descend onto firm ground, easily finding open space in the sand amid their relatives to spend the night.

Birds were still arriving when we left the bridge along with the last of the tourists and our volunteer guides. The drive to Kearney on the freeway was no big deal, perhaps because we'd learned from one of the guides that the footbridge at the Fort Kearney Recreation Area, a mere six miles from our motel, was one of the best places from which to watch the birds take off in the morning. But you had to get there before sunrise to see it unfold.

A thousand cranes take flight

Note: I could easily have found some majestic scenes online, taken at close range with telephoto lens, of cranes arriving or departing in golden light, like a Hallmark card, but that's neither what we saw nor how we felt. It was 40 degrees and drizzling slightly on the Ft. Kearney footbridge, and the wind was fierce.