Back home I might have seen a fat moon rising over the Empire State Building, but to have the oldest birds on the planet intersect with it, and with me, I need to travel 1,300 miles, to a particular place at a particular time. But the next day the moon is on the cover of the Omaha World-Herald, and I learn that it is a “supermoon,” closer to the earth than at any time in the past 20 or so years. Part of me simply decides that this is what happens when you fly to the middle of America to look at cranes things get bigger and more beautiful, or at least noticed with a new eye.
The moon is nearly full, massive and orange. Ever since a stranger’s chance comment about the birds of Central Park led me to an introductory birdwatching class at New York City Audubon 15 years ago, I have been in love with birds and perpetually grateful to them for opening up to me the hidden wild places in my city, my country, my planet, and, most surprisingly of all, myself.įrom Omaha I drive 182 miles west to Kearney, Nebraska. But despite their frenzied feeding, these social birds-who mate for life and remain behind if their mate is sick or injured-still find time to do the thing for which cranes are most famous: dance.ĭeparting New York City for Omaha in peak crane season, I can’t help marveling at my own lucky journey through space and time. Along the Platte, having already flown some 600 miles from the American Southwest, they will gorge themselves on the abundant remains of numerous cornfields, gaining 20 percent of their body weight in anticipation of the thousands of miles still before them. We know it as the sandhill crane, and while this most ancient of birds would be a marvel in any form, it happens to participate in one of the great mass migrations on the planet, making a journey through space that is as remarkable as its journey through time.īetween February and April, more than half a million sandhill cranes crowd through a short stretch of the Platte River of central Nebraska, staging for an odyssey that ends as far north as the tundra of eastern Siberia. The camels and the weird deer are gone, but astonishingly, the bird-or its structurally identical relative-is still around. Its Miocene neighbors included the saber-toothed deer-which sounds like a Monty Python joke but really existed-and prehistoric versions of the rhinoceros and the camel. The bird stood some four feet tall and had a wingspan of more than six feet. Once upon a time, before humans diverged from chimpanzees or the Grand Canyon had been carved out of its rock, an extraordinary bird walked and flew the earth in the area we now call Nebraska.
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