In Nebraska: A Joyful Spring Racket

By J. MADELEINE NASH

The Moeller farm on Mormon Island, Neb., lies right in the path of the central flyway, a great avian migratory route that runs from central Mexico to eastern Siberia. Through it each spring pass 560,000 sandhill cranes, 9 million ducks and geese, more than 500 bald eagles, 104 piping plovers, 110 least terns and 96 of the world's remaining population of 171 whooping cranes. Few bird watchers are lucky enough to spot the latter along their 2,500-mile flight from the Gulf Coast of Texas to Canada's Northwest Territories. They are secretive, and they travel in small groups. But no one in the area along Nebraska's Platte River can avoid encountering the whooper's brethren, the sandhills, which tarry for weeks in concentrations of 20,000 per mile.

The gathering of sandhill cranes on and around the Moeller farm is one of nature's most spectacular rites of spring. "It is," writes Ornithologist Roger Tory Peterson, "the largest concentration of any species of crane anywhere in the world." In the lifting darkness that precedes sunrise, the sandhills roosting in the shallows might be mistaken for carvings on a stone frieze. Soon the frieze begins to ripple with motion as the cranes stretch their wings and, voices rising, take off in small groups of 20 and 30. For over an hour, the river casts out lines of great gray birds. They soar over winter-brown pasture and goldencorn stubble--giant kites on invisible strings. But sandhill cranes cannot pass for paper birds very long. The racket they make gives them away.

Listening to the sandhills is much like hearing unfamiliar and cacophonous music. Cranes cannot be said to sing. Rather, they are a whole orchestra that can reproduce at one and the same time the sound of geese honking, frogs croaking, cats purring, whistles blowing, castanets clicking, trumpets blaring, flutes trilling and even the roaring cheers of a fully packed football stadium. "As soon as you hear it," nods Don Howell, a retired telephone company man from nearby Grand Island, "you just know they're cranes."

The annual chorus is a familiar sound to Pat and Larry Moeller. "It's eerie," says Pat. "A couple of weeks ago, there were so many they filled the sky, and there was not a one that didn't have its mouth open." The Moellers live in a white farmhouse on 400 acres of land that used to belong to Larry's father and uncle, and before that his grandfather, and before that his great grandfather. Next year, however, title to the property will pass to a local conservation group called the Platte River Whooping Crane Maintenance Trust. "It's kind of sad to see it go," says Larry of the sale of the family homestead. "But my dad and uncle are both retiring, and I guess they wanted a little cash in their pockets." For as long as he can remember, Larry Moeller has associated the cranes with the coming of spring. This year the first pairs landed on Feb. 1, declaring an end to winter almost two weeks early. Ever since, the Moellers have become bird-watcher watchers. Led by a guide from the trust, cars and campers with license plates from all over the country parade daily by the farmhouse looking for cranes. At dawn and at dusk, the visitors gather in a large blind built of concrete blocks and sunk into a riverside berm like a war-zone bunker. In crane country it is people who are the interlopers.

"Look at them come! Look at them come!" exults Donald Menke, a courtly, silver-haired realtor from St. Louis. "The Nebraska team has just made a first down," he chuckles. "Do you suppose they're all talking about where they're going to fly today? Or is it 'may I have the first dance?' " Through his powerful scope, Menke has caught one 4-ft.-tall sandhill in an elaborate mating dance, bowing his long neck and arching his wings. But it is feeding, not courting, that occupies most of the cranes' time.

In the morning, the sandhills go from the river to the wet meadows to snack on earthworms and snails. Then they head for the cornfields to fill up on corn. The weight the sandhills gain on the Platte will sustain them through the rigors of their journey to breeding grounds far north. Vera Coons, a retired beauty-shop owner from Grand Island, will never forget the experience of encountering a sandhill crane in Point Barrow, Alaska. "I just about disintegrated," she recalls. "It would have had to have come through here, I thought."

Larry Moeller sees the cranes as a beneficent force. "In the pastures where a cow chip is, they'll flip it over to eat the worms out and that aerates the field and helps the grass come up." Cranes perform an additional service by cleaning the fields of last year's corn: every kernel eaten by cranes reduces the number of "volunteer" seedlings that would otherwise compete with this year's crop. Still, Basil Otto, a crusty old farmer whose field ends at the river, doesn't care for cranes. "I can't think of anything a crane is good for," he grouses. "It seems some people are hung up on cranes. Not ducks and geese, mind you--they don't care about them. And they don't care one whit about the farmer."

Farmers and sandhill cranes have coexisted along the Platte since the 1850s. Ironically, these days it is not the cranes but the farmers who are endangered. Battered by high debts and low crop prices, many have been forced to put their land up for sale, and the private nonprofit Platte River Trust has been one of the few active buyers. "That's one of the hard parts of my job," sighs John VanDerwalker, executive director of the trust. "It's tough seeing families separated from land that has been theirs for generations."

A wiry zoologist with a preacher's zeal, VanDerwalker has dreams as big as the pioneers who first put the prairies to plow. He dreams of reversing the process. To date the trust has managed to buy 4,700 acres of riverfront property. In addition, through the purchase of conservation easements, it is able to prohibit plowing and pesticide use on 1,600 acres more. Eventually, VanDerwalker hopes the trust will be able to return 25,000 acres of farmland to native marsh and prairie.

The sandhill cranes are not in danger, says VanDerwalker--at least not yet. But their riverine habitat is rapidly disappearing. A series of large dams and reservoirs currently divert some 70% of the Platte River's annual flow for irrigation, electricity and municipal water supplies."

As recently as 1938, the Platte near Kearney measured almost a mile wide. The sandbars in mid-river, annually scoured by ice and high water, were just the way the wary cranes like them: free of predator-concealing vegetation. Today those same sandbars have developed into large islands overgrown with brush and cottonwood trees. Around them the water, only half a mile across, flows in narrow channels too deep for cranes. The result: where the birds used to spread out over 300 miles of river, they now congregate in one 80-mile stretch. As they crowd ever more densely together, thousands could be lost to disease.

For now, however, the sandhills seem to inhabit a charmed world. Their persistent presence in that world stirs hidden human watchers. Midwestern Environmentalist Ross Sublett, an official with the Nature Conservancy, has seen the cranes many times, but at day's end, peering through the torn burlap curtain of a small wooden blind, he marvels anew at the squadrons of cranes landing in the Platte like parachutists dropping from the sky. Dark descends, and a full moon magically rises, throwing a broad moon-beam across both river and cranes. "What's the fascination?" Sublett murmurs. With the cries of the cranes filling the air, he answers his own question. "I guess it's that they've been coming here for millenniums, and they're still coming here. I guess we haven't screwed it up yet." --By J. Madeleine Nash