The Sandhills

A lovely drive across the Nebraska Sandhills to Mullen, our admiration of the landscape for the most part uninterrupted by birds. It’s just plain windy out there today! There was a tense moment when a lone Greater Prairie-Chicken blew across the road, giving good views to those of us in the front of the vehicle and no views at all to those in the back. But we made it up–and how.

We arrived in Mullen early afternoon, and Mitch Glidden (www.sandhillsmotel.com) packed us into his Suburban and drove us out south of Seneca through deep snow and inchoate mud. Horned Larks were about the only thing stirring in the wind, until a beautiful Rough-legged Hawk braved the breezes to hover and hunt over the dunes. Now that’s how I remember the Sandhills in winter!

It was a rough 40 minutes to our destination, a decommissioned schoolbus on the edge of an irrigated alfalfa field. Prairie-Chickens flushed at our arrival, but it wasn’t long after we’d disappeared into our big yellow blind that they returned, nearly 80 birds in all, to forage on the windswept crests, and some of them, at last, to boom. I never tire of the lekking grouse, and though the wind made it hard to hear, it was a fascinating couple of hours as the birds danced just a few yards away, pinnae erect to reveal those shocking orange sacs on the neck. It is always an affecting show, the surest way I know to feel the past of the prairies all around you in the present.