In the High Plains of western Nebraska, Bighorn Sheep can be found scaling the buttes that rise above the North Platte River Valley. However, that was not always the case. Bighorn Sheep were once commonly found in the Great Plains and American West but were nearly hunted to extinction. Thanks to conservation groups and landowners, […]

Time-lapse produced by Carlee Koehler  The first time I saw a trumpeter swan in the wild, up close, I was so cold I couldn’t feel my face. It was early January along Blue Creek in the western Nebraska Sandhills, and most of the high plains lakes, rivers and streams were locked in ice after a […]

If you listen closely and long enough, every rivulet, stream and river has a song – each note, measure and verse comprised of every force that has ever shaped it and every creature that has ever drawn life from its waters. And if these watery lifelines have songs, then their most striking melodies are sung […]

University of Nebraska-Kearney graduate student, Heather Johnson partnered with the Platte Basin Timelapse (PBT) team to place time-lapse cameras on trumpeter swan (Cygnus buccinator) nests. The cameras allowed her to monitor nesting behavior of swans in the Sandhills of Nebraska. In summer 2016, Michael Forsberg and Heather set up cameras on two nests. The first […]

Nebraska irrigates more farmland than any state in the nation, and a lot of that water is pumped from underground. A new program for sharing Nebraska’s groundwater may help both farmers and endangered species.

Don Welch is a Nebraska poet and author, recently retired from 50 years of teaching at the University of Nebraska at Kearney. He’s lived most of his life with his wife Marcia in central Nebraska, where much of his work has been influenced by the natural world.

Colorado Parks and Wildlife is one of several state and federal agencies that has been working for decades to recover the federally threatened greenback cutthroat trout. But a few years ago, new genetic research revealed that they’d been saving the wrong subspecies.

In the predawn hours of an early Saturday in April, cars creep quietly along a gravel road south of the Platte River’s main channel. For the last half hour, the dark sky has nibbled away at the edge of the full moon above, the lucky occurrence of a rare lunar eclipse.

Few modern species can lay claim to older origins than the sandhill crane. Each spring, 80 percent of the mid-continent population spends a few weeks along the central stretch of the Platte River in Nebraska. But this unprecedented concentration of birds on the Platte represents a challenged ecosystem.

On a hot humid morning in late June, I got out of the truck dressed in a faded white cotton t-shirt, baggie shorts, and teva sandals, with a small backpack slung over my shoulder. I looked like I was headed out for a day at the beach. And I was. Well, sort of. In a […]

On a warm, sandy beach near Ashland, Neb., biology intern Lindsay Brown picks up a small mottled egg and holds it to her ear, listening for telltale scratching. Hearing nothing, she places it back into its nest—a small hollowed patch of sand. It’s a hot July afternoon, near the end of the nesting season, and she’s checking least tern and piping plover nests for late bloomers.

Earlier this summer I drove a 1,756 mile loop up, down and around the edges of a tilted tabletop in the heart of North America. Born high in the Colorado Rockies, the Platte River Basin loses 12,000 feet in elevation west to east, draining 90,000 square miles across the plains until it flows into the […]

They traveled in buckets, passed hand to hand from truck bed to lakeshore, before being carefully upended just above the surface by proud biologists. With each splash, another batch of young greenback cutthroat trout slid into the glassy waters of Zimmerman Lake – back into their native range high in Colorado’s South Platte River Basin.

The Platte Basin Timelapse Project enters its fourth year this summer. During the past three years, we’ve successfully installed more than 40 remote time-lapse systems from the headwaters of the Platte River in Colorado to its confluence with the Missouri River in Nebraska (solving countless technical challenges along the way). To date, our cameras have […]