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 […]

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 […]

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.

Wet meadows are groundwater-fed wetlands within larger grassland environments. Along the Platte…

On a beautiful August morning, the sun penetrated through the clouds and reflected off the mucky water as I trekked through a slough on Shoemaker Island, a wet meadow adjacent to the Platte River in central Nebraska. I followed staff and interns with the Crane Trust to check on small mammal traps that were placed […]

Wet meadows and grasslands are typically hydrologically connected to the river, so they are important for crane courtship, loafing, and bathing areas. They are diverse and secluded, where cranes can roost at times when the river is unsuitable.

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.