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 mid-April, I was fortunate enough to witness greater sage-grouse courtship displays on Pathfinder Ranches in south-central Wyoming. Below is a short film I edited together from the footage I shot from this trip accompanied with a short essay about these birds. Platte Basin Timelapse will continue to develop the larger story about grouse species […]

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 […]

In the upper reaches of North America’s watersheds, one will find a charismatic chunky gray bird dipping and diving underwater in clear, fast-flowing streams. This bird is called the American dipper and is North America’s only aquatic songbird. Photographer and conservationist Mike Forsberg fell in love with the American dipper on a college fishing trip. […]

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 […]

The idea for the scavenger project started when I saw a photo on Instagram of vultures feeding on a carcass. The image was distinctive because it was taken within the deteriorating carcass. At the time, I was attending WiLDSPEAK, a conservation photography symposium. The presenters’ passion for conservation and wildlife was inspiring, and that made […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]