Crane migration in Nebraska – Credit: Kylee Warren / Crane Trust

If all the birds disappeared, men’s eyes would starve. —Don Welch (journal entry)

In a letter to friend and fellow Nebraskan Stan Smith, my father anticipated crane time: “It’s in the air. Pretty soon we will hear them before we see them, that long, high yodeling sound as if the sun had its symphony of wood-winds.”  As missiles are launched and stock prices fall, I confess to logging onto the live webcam from the Rowe Sanctuary, a wildlife refuge on the Platte River near Gibbon, Nebraska. Here, you can lose yourself in the chortling masses of sandhill cranes during their spring migration. This refuge is, in the words of poet Robert Frost, “a momentary stay against confusion.” It may be momentary, but I’ll gratefully take it.

My siblings and I grew up loving cranes because our parents first did. When we grew old enough to ask about how our parents met, they regaled us with the story of their first date. While other college students were holed up in vinyl booths of local diners or necking in parked cars, my parents were crouching behind a haystack in a field along the Platte River. My dad said he sprung for two dime cups of coffee and drove my mom into the countryside, where he planned to introduce her to the magnificence of the crane migration, close up and in person. And so began my parents’ annual spring pilgrimage to the crane fields.

After my father’s death in 2016, I inherited many of his books and files. One file labeled “Old Pete” caught my eye. In it was research my dad had collected from Mark Peyton, a Gothenburg, NE resident, regarding Old Pete and the whooping crane recovery and captive breeding program. A wounded whooping crane found near Brady, NE, in May 1936, Old Pete became the patriarch of this recovery and breeding program. Housed at the Gothenburg Game Refuge, 3,000 acres south of Gothenburg, NE, along the Platte River, he was one of 20 remaining whooping cranes in the world and one of only two whooping cranes in captivity. Peyton’s interest in Old Pete’s story was sparked when Gothenburg natives Tot and Pauline Holmes told him that the whooping crane population today owes their existence to Old Pete. From there, he gathered information from locals, biologists, and scientific journals concerning Old Pete’s contribution to whooping crane survival. It was clear my dad was fascinated with this research, for his folder contained copies of Peyton’s work.

As my dad was introducing his poem “White Cranes in Spring” during an address he once gave at the University of Nebraska Kearney, he recalled how, as a child, his father had taken him to Bert Daggett’s place, south of Gothenburg. Daggett ran the city dump, mended fences, and fed the birds at the Gothenburg Game Refuge. At the time my father visited, Bert had a menagerie of wounded and crippled birds, including Crip, one of the few existing whooping cranes at that time, and who, along with Old Pete, was one of the first cranes drafted into the captive breeding program. 

My dad loved a good bird story and came to regard these whooping cranes as heroic figures to be memorialized. In his book Gnomes, he writes of Old Crip:

        For just a moment
	I am 6 and running again with Crip,
	a white crane dangling his hopeless right wing.

	Running ahead of him,
	my hand full of tease bread, his left wing way-high;
	under the blister of a Dust Bowl sky.  

Last year, I made a trip to Nebraska in April and was dismayed to discover I’d missed the cranes. In previous springs, when I’d returned to Kearney, I’d roll down my windows after I passed Grand Island in hopes of hearing the cranes in the fields. Even with Interstate traffic, I could often hear them. Their collective voices, “that long, high yodeling sound,” welcomed me home. My dad wrote that without birds, “men’s eyes would starve.” As would our ears. Entering a field of sandhill cranes is a full-body experience.

For my Iowa readers—and readers unfamiliar with Nebraska’s crane migration—consider a trip to central Nebraska some spring to take in the spectacle. As you look out upon the Platte River, you may be fortunate enough to spot a whooping crane, a descendant of Old Pete or Crip, a stately white figure among the gray masses. Visit the Rowe Sanctuary, where one of my father’s poems hangs in the entry, and where you’ll be graced with all-things-crane. You won’t be sorry.

White Cranes in Spring
                     —for Marcia

There were white cranes that spring
the feathered bowls of their wings
scooping out air, lifting them up
like unstemmed peonies.

Over the Gulf they could only circle
so long as Galveston’s halos
before they broke for the Platte,
a blue braid which runs through Nebraska.

For centuries they had danced on 
corn bones, on the fossilized memories
of nomads, or played contrabassoons
to the winter through the long folds

in their syrinx. In each bird
was a red germ, the unison cipher
of sex. And that spring,
paired up, we too flew north,

following the kissed-out leaves
of the willows, as if for a million springs
we had said the same thing
and were crying it hoarsely.
          Don Welch (1992)


My Mother Visits the Sandhill Cranes

She remembers the first time.
When others were coupling in dark theaters 
or drinking sodas in corner booths,
she knelt along the Platte River behind a haystack 
where her date promised she would be amazed,
where soon his presence would eclipse
the universe of gray bodies that had spread out
before them.

The day was ending,
but the field would not succumb,
the warm earth breathing beneath great wings
which hummed and fanned the flames
of last light.  

They mate for life, he told her,
his hand finding hers 
as the March wind took a corner of the haystack
and blew it towards the river.

When it was finally too dark to see
and they made their way back to the road
where he’d parked his car,
she’d already seen how she would return: 
      
      to this field of a thousand dancing birds,
      to this love with an enormous wingspan,
      to this man.
                                                              
          Shannon Vesely (2022)