Photo essay by Lori Potter for the Flatwater Free Press
My sandhill crane knowledge and appreciation have grown in the nearly four decades since I first photographed one the world’s great migration events.
It’s difficult to explain why I enjoy watching and photographing the estimated 1 million sandhill cranes that stop each March in the Central Platte Valley.
As a child, I saw cranes during 35-mile drives from our farm south of Wilcox to Kearney to visit family, shop or go to movies. Almost no one knew then that their visit was one the world’s great migration events.
My crane knowledge and appreciation have grown in the nearly four decades since I started as a Kearney Hub reporter-photographer, including five years in retirement as a freelance journalist.
I like that cranes mate for life, travel in families and have a migration routine. They fly from southeast Texas to northern Canada, Alaska and Siberia and back, with the spring midmigration stop in Nebraska to rest and gain weight.
I enjoy listening to crane chatter, but don’t understand how they sort out individual messages when hundreds of cranes are talking at once.
“Ode to Joy” can play in my head when I photograph cranes dancing, despite knowing that jumps, bowing and wing spreading might also reflect courting or being nervous.
I asked a southeast Nebraska woman years ago why her family comes to the Kearney area every March to see cranes. Her answer became my answer: “Because it’s magic every time.”
Sandhill cranes gather in a creek near Fort Kearny on March 18.
A sandhill crane is reflected in a puddle of water near the Platte River on March 24.
Sandhill cranes blend in with their gray surroundings on a Platte River sandbar near Audubon’s Rowe Sanctuary on March 24 near Gibbon.
