I’m quite serious when I say that heaven must look a lot like the Nebraska Sandhills.

 

These 20,000 square miles (!!) of vegetated sand dunes, crossed by pristine rivers and dotted with grassy marshes, are the last great stronghold of the prairie grouse, and as I have written elsewhere, the ranchers and townspeople of Hooker County are justifiably proud of their distinguished avian neighbors.

After a very good supper at the Rustic in Mullen, we rose early Tuesday morning to visit a Sharp-tailed Grouse lek just northeast of town. Mitch drove us out past the Middle Loup to a pasture that seemed as vast as the starry sky, and we took our seats in the big yellow blind; we were glad, for the first time the entire trip, to have brought winter clothes, and the thermos of coffee Mitch had brought along was as welcome a sight as the rising sun.

I love prairie-chickens, but for sheer weirdness, nothing beats the dance of Sharp-tailed Grouse. The bizarre cackling and low moans started well before light, and when the sun finally rose, we found the lek occupied by at least 8 males; there may have been a single female, too. Soon the dancing started, the birds opening their wings, stretching their necks, and sticking their absurdly small tails into the air.

Like demonic wind-up toys, the males turn tight circles, rattling the quills of their tail feathers and stomping loudly with their feathered feet. The confrontations between rivals end with a staring contest, each bird crouched, wings sometimes spread, each holding as still as possible.

And then it’s on to the next dance, chasing the next rival from the favored position on the lek.

They’re maniacs on the floor, and I wouldn’t miss this show for the world.

It’s a breathtakingly beautiful drive from Grand Island to Mullen, and the birds and the landscape lured us off the highway so often that it was nearly 3:00 by the time we arrived at the meeting place for our grouse excursions. The Sandhills Motel is always a delightful and comfortable place to stay, and thanks to Patty and Mitch’s efforts to make us feel at home, participants in the Nebraska trip often rate it higher than the motels in Omaha and Grand Island.

And the birding is most certainly a high point. We pulled in, got our rooms, and before we knew it we were in the old yellow schoolbus, headed for the matinee at one of the several leks Mitch monitors each spring.

The blind at this booming ground was a converted stock trailer, and we waited, comfortably out of the wind, as Long-billed Curlews paced off the pasture and a Rough-legged Hawk perched patiently on the ground.

In just a few minutes, what had seemed bare ground

 

 was populated with Greater Prairie-Chickens, walking and flying in from all directions. The Rough-legged Hawk and a roaming coyote were apparently making the birds nervous, but the braver among them danced and boomed anyway.

 

The first-timers in the blind were wide-eyed the whole time, and even those of us who had seen it many times before were moved, as always, to look these wonderful birds in the eye.

 

Sunrise on the Platte River in late March: no better time and no better place for a birder, especially when, as this year, you can be out there in a jacket!

Huge flocks of Sandhill Cranes had met us, right on cue, as we arrived in Grand Island Sunday afternoon, and it took us several hours to drive as far west as Fort Kearny, pausing a couple of times a mile to scan the hordes for black necks or white bodies. We found no rare cranes (somebody in the van said something about needles in haystacks or something like that…), but we did get to enjoy an arriving Loggerhead Shrike and a few waterfowl, including the first Ross’s Goose of the trip. Western Meadowlarks and Harris’s Sparrows were audible and visible all along the roadside, and a well-timed bathroom stop produced (I almost wrote “flushed”!) a Great Horned Owl near Kearney. (As a native Nebraskan, I’m proud to know the orthographic difference between Fort Kearny and the town of Kearney).

On a top-secret tip, we decided to spend the evening at the pedestrian bridge at the state park. No big white birds, alas, but the spectacle of many thousands of Sandhill Cranes coming in to the river more than made up for it, especially when a Bald Eagle drifted past, creating a literal uproar that echoed in our ears for hours after.

Monday morning found us at the Alda bridge in the dark, waiting for the sunrise and for the birds. The noise level told us that we had found a large roost, and as the sky brightened, we could see that it was massive indeed.

Impossible to count the birds, but we guessed 50,000 at this bend of the river, and I would not be surprised to hear that the actual figure was twice that.

For some reason, the cranes were slow to leave the roost, and we watched them lift off by the hundreds rather than by the thousands, prolonging the show and giving us chances to watch Greater Yellowlegs and Wilson’s Snipe on the river, while Harris’s Sparrows and both Eastern and Western Meadowlarks sang from the edges. It was one of the most exciting, and one of the most comfortable, dawn cranewatches I’d ever been privileged to be a part of, and it sets a high standard to reach for on next year’s tour!