The Booming Ground

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.