The sandhill cranes stage in the Platte River valley of central Nebraska every spring, and the staging is one of the great natural events of North America. Around half a million birds funnel through a stretch of river roughly eighty miles long, between late February and early April, on their way north from wintering grounds in Texas and Mexico to breeding territories in Canada and Alaska and Siberia. I drove out to see them last week.

The drive itself is most of the trip. From where I live it is two long days west through farmland and small towns and the flat country that does not advertise itself but is, when you give it time, one of the best landscapes in the country to drive across slowly. The cranes have been doing this migration for tens of thousands of years. The Platte has been part of it for at least the last several thousand. The interstates running parallel to it are sixty years old.

A Two-Day Drive Across the Prairie

I stopped overnight in a town along the way that had a small casino at the truck stop on the edge of it. This is increasingly common in the rural Midwest. A handful of slot machines and a couple of tables, often attached to a hotel or a convenience store, often run as a tribal operation or under a state compact. The place was busier than I expected at nine on a Thursday night. I bought a coffee and a sandwich at the diner that shared the same parking lot and sat at the window watching the parking lot until the food was ready, and the contrast between the parking lot and the dark prairie just past the edge of the lights was the kind of contrast you do not get in most places. Half a mile away, beyond the highway exit, the cranes were already coming in for the night. I could not see them but I could, just barely, hear them when a truck was not passing.

The crane staging itself happens on the river. The birds spend the day in the surrounding fields, eating waste corn and gleaning insects and bulking up for the next leg of the flight. In the evening they fly to the river to roost, in the shallow channels where they are safe from coyotes, and they come in by the thousands at once with a sound you can hear from a long way off.

The Crane Staging at Dawn

I had reserved a spot on a blind for the Friday morning, and the early start meant being on the river before sunrise. The cold was real. By the time the light started coming up there were maybe twenty thousand cranes in the water in front of us, in shallows the color of weak coffee, gray birds against gray water, all of them softly calling. When the sun crested the bluff to the east the entire flock lifted off in a series of waves, with the noise rising as they did, and went out into the fields for the day. It took close to half an hour for all of them to leave. There is no other natural sound I have heard that is comparable. The closest is large flocks of snow geese, which the Platte also has, and which were calling underneath the cranes that morning in their own pitch.

I drove back east on Saturday with the windows cracked because the air was warming and the sun was on the side of the truck the whole afternoon. The cranes had been everything I had read they would be, and the drive itself, with the small town stops and the long horizon, had given the trip a shape I would not have gotten from a flight. A drive across the middle of the country in late winter, with one big destination at the end of it, is one of my favorite kinds of trip. There is no rush. The country fills you up slowly.

The total count from the trip, by the rough estimate of the blind guide, was that we had been in the presence of about 23,000 birds at dawn on Friday. Multiply that by the entire river over the season and the number is closer to 500,000, but the number that mattered to me, standing in the blind that morning, was the one I was inside of, and that one was uncountable in any useful way.