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 […]

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 […]

It is Spring 1975. It is just coming on dawn at Crow Dog’s place on the White River. I am trying to get some sleep after being up for the last two nights. I am laying on the frosty grass half tucked in under my Chevrolet Vega wrapped in a sleeping bag – but the […]

Photography has been a hobby of mine for several years. During that time, some of my favorite subjects to photograph have been wildlife. When I first started photographing wildlife, I would often go out to prairies and wetlands and hope that I would stumble across something interesting to photograph. I have learned that this is […]

While meeting with the Platte Basin Timelapse (PBT) team for the first time last fall, I realized the magnitude of their efforts to catalog the movement of water, temporal change in various habitats, and diverse organisms that reside in the Platte River Basin. Little did I know that this meeting would significantly affect my future […]

Chad Gideon farms between Grand Island and Kearney. Recently, he and his family bought property on the Platte River to ensure their continued access for hunting and fishing.

One of the most prominent and successful photographic pioneers was John Carbutt of Chicago, who made major advances in the materials used to create and develop film. But decades before he did that, Carbutt journeyed to Nebraska and the Platte Valley as the official photographer for an amazingly large publicity stunt by the Union Pacific Rail Company as it rushed to complete the transcontinental railroad.

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.

Twice a year, the world’s largest remaining wild population of endangered whooping cranes makes the 2,500-mile journey between breeding grounds in Canada’s Northwest Territories and wintering grounds on the Texas Gulf Coast, using the Great Plains as their migratory corridor. Biologist are tracking these rare birds to learn more about their migration.

Each spring, sandhill cranes communally roost in the braided channels of the Platte River in central Nebraska. The river channel’s shallow areas and in-stream bare sandbars provide protection from predators, allowing the cranes to rest overnight.