Imagine trying to count hundreds of thousands of birds in a matter of seconds. This is what Andy Caven does every spring… from a plane. In March, upwards of a million sandhill cranes pass through Nebraska’s central Platte River Valley. For the past 20 years, the Crane Trust has conducted aerial surveys of sandhill crane […]

When I was in high school, my environmental science teacher had our class plant a prairie garden on campus. Inspired by the idea of ripping up sod and replacing it with the native plants that rightfully belonged there, I asked my parents if I could plant a prairie garden in our backyard. They said yes. […]

Growing up in Columbus in east-central Nebraska, I rarely ventured west through the Cornhusker State as a kid. However, that changed when I made the decision to attend the University of Nebraska at Kearney (UNK), a two-hour drive southwest of my hometown. Living in Kearney provided a change in scenery from Columbus, as well as […]

It’s 4 a.m. and Forsberg and I are on the road to the Crane Trust south of Wood River, Nebraska. I’ve visited the Crane Trust twice before this morning: once for a brief school-sanctioned plunge into the Platte River with my classmates sophomore year, and again a few months ago to watch Sandhill Cranes migrating […]

In the first few weeks of a job I took for two reasons – to travel and receive tuition remission (which wouldn’t deliver either outcome) – I researched species impacted by agriculture: dolphins in China’s Yangtze River, koalas in Australia’s New South Wales and Sandhill Cranes in Nebraska. How little I knew about the connectivity […]

On August 21, 2017, the moon aligned between the earth and sun, casting a shadow that moved over the United States from Oregon to South Carolina, passing through Nebraska. Dubbed The Great American Eclipse, thousands of people flocked to the state to witness the once in a lifetime event. In addition to the thousands of […]

At first look, the Great Plain’s most striking characteristic is often the vast, open horizon that may invoke a sense of emptiness. While driving along I-80 through central Nebraska, it is easy to dismiss the surrounding land as monotonous – a lackluster flip-book of crop fields where each page is exactly the same. But hidden among the sea […]

For thousands of years sandhill cranes have flocked to the Platte River Valley to replenish their energy reserves before they head north to their breeding grounds in the Arctic. The last two years I have been fortunate enough to regularly observe and photograph these prehistoric birds during their time in Nebraska. However photographing cranes comes […]

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.