Most Nebraskans are familiar with sandhill cranes, which in March and early April populate the Platte River Valley by the hundreds of thousands. Some are even fortunate enough to spot the rare whooping crane, which migrates with its sandhill cousins each spring. But fewer travelers and birdwatchers have discovered one of the state’s most beautiful birding venues, Highway 97 through the Sandhills from Valentine to North Platte.

We left Valentine in early morning, the birdwatcher’s golden
hour, and headed south. Above the rushing falls of the
Snake River on the edge of the Samuel R. McKelvie National
Forest – the Niagara of Nebraska – a pair of American kestrels,
sparrow hawks, mated at the pinnacle of a pine. In the
midst of a wetland between Merritt Reservoir and the Loup
River, 15 pairs of great blue herons sailed above or stood
astride brushy nests in a great rookery in the tops of ancient
cottonwoods. A few miles down the road in a grove of willows
beside a pond, we found the neighborhood of a dozen
nesting double-crested cormorants. Just north of Mullen a
coyote slunk through a healthier than average meadow of
blue stem and buff alo grass, stalking a meadowlark.

Finally we met the lazy river west of North Platte in late
aft ernoon – plenty of time to cruise the river road and stalk
through cattails and swamps, nudging our bird count up,
adding to the harriers and hawks, horned larks, killdeer,
bobwhites, and sharp-tailed grouse of the Sandhills a fl ock
of pelicans, a fl icker, a belted kingfi sher and a loggerhead
shrike. And thousands of cranes.

Every field of last year’s stubble had its fl ock. Sometimes a
dozen or two, sometimes hundreds in throngs so thick the
horizon was a blanket of legs and beaks and undulating gray,
accented by fl ashing red skulls. Th ey peck at corn, stand
soaking the sun, pirouette in pairs and dance in bands. As
the sun sinks low they rise on 80-inch wings and fl oat off to
their nightly sanctuary in the shallow waters and sandbars of
the Platte.

In a pleasant day of slow driving through 150 miles of
Sandhills, we had identifi ed four dozen species of birds. By
summer the cranes and a few other species migrate to northern
nesting grounds, but a surprising number, like some
birdwatchers I know, are content to summer somewhere on
Highway 97.
– Jerry Wilson