I’ve reached that age where I sometimes think that everything was better when I was a boy. This spring’s WINGS tour of Nebraska provided a stunning counterexample: in 33 years of March visits to the central Platte River, I had never beheld so stunning a sight as the quarter of a million noisy Sandhill Cranes that streamed over our heads to land in the shallows of the river on one of our evening visits to the Gibbon Bridge. The birds were eventually packed so tightly that they look in the dusky light like topographic features, huge wide “sandbars” where the river had been empty just minutes before.

The sight—and the sound—of that terrific horde could have made our next morning’s visit to a riverside blind 20 miles downstream an anticlimax. But as the sun rose on the mere tens of thousands of birds on that roost, we discovered that they had been joined in the night by a lone adult Whooping Crane, one of only about 300 individuals making up the mid-continent flock and only the second ever recorded on a WINGS tour to Nebraska.

Our week was full of such surprises, most of them attributable to the incredibly warm weather and violent southerly winds with which we started the tour. The spring-like weather cost us the expected waterfowl show; though we tallied 23 species, including Ross’s and Cackling Geese and a somewhat easterly Cinnamon Teal, we never saw more than a few hundred waterfowl gathered at any single site.

Many raptors had also apparently taken advantage of the breezes to move north, but we were just in time to catch a fine lingering Harlan’s Hawk south of Rowe Sanctuary, even as the first of the Turkey Vultures were appearing.

Shorebirds, as might be expected, were unusually diverse for the date, with nine species over the week (including seven in the little puddle off the parking lot of our Grand Island hotel). In fact, it was a sandpiper that started our tour: at least three American Woodcock braved the winds to peent and twitter over the grassy fields of Lake Manawa on our first evening. We had time before the evening show to scan the massive gull flock, among which we discovered the only Franklin’s Gulls we would find on the tour.

The next morning was still warm and still windy, but we wandered the Missouri River floodplain of Fontenelle Forest, astonished at the silt and debris left by last year’s great flood; many of the trees still showed high water marks well above our heads.

But river bottom forest is nothing if not resilient, and plants were already sending shoots up through the sand. An Eastern Gray Squirrel was an exciting surprise at the very northern edge of its limited Nebraska range, and painted turtles sunned on the logs. Red Fox and Swamp Sparrows were just on the cusp of their “normal” arrival dates, and two Eastern Winter Wrens sang from the flotsam. One of Nebraska’s rarest breeding birds, the Pileated Woodpecker, was represented by at least two individuals; after nearly a century’s extirpation, this wildest of the picids is slowly re-establishing a population in the state’s remnant deciduous forests.

Lunchtime found us at Runza Hut, Nebraska’s delicious contribution to the fast-food universe.

And then it was time to head west. Apparently inspired by the early migrants, we briefly overshot our destination; soon enough, though, we were standing, buffeted by the winds, on the shore of Branched Oak Lake, where we eventually found a staked-out Neotropic Cormorant, a species still only casual in the state. We rejoined the interstate west of Lincoln and pressed on, greeted by our first Sandhill Cranes just on the Hall County line. We birded the feeders at the Crane Trust, picking up the first White-throated Sparrow ever recorded on this tour, then drove west along the south bank of the Platte to Gibbon Bridge, where the crane flight was better than any I had ever witnessed. With their throaty rattles still echoing in our ears, we enjoyed a steak dinner in Grand Island and looked forward to what the next morning would bring.

What the next morning brought was the threat of rain. It was still dry when we arrived on the southern edge of the vast Taylor Ranch, though, and we soon found ourselves scoping a gang of half a dozen male Greater Prairie-Chickens dancing on a distant lek. Hunger and the first raindrops hit at precisely the same time, and the skies broke just as we decided to break for breakfast. Car birding was in order, and there’s no better place for that than the Grand Island cemetery, which was covered with Dark-eyed Juncos of three subspecies and scattered Harris’s and White-crowned Sparrows.

By the time we felt the need to stretch our legs, the rain had ended and the sky was clearing. We could feel the wind moving into the north, but we braved the light chill—perfectly normal for March, but a shock after the warm days before—to walk the rail trail at Fort Kearny.

Juncos and Harris’s Sparrows were common here, too, and they were joined by two singing Field Sparrows; even just ten years ago, those birds would have been notably early, but nowadays, arrival is expected in the last days of March. A fine male Myrtle Warbler was the only parulid we found all week; it was also, as we discovered on reviewing our list that evening, the first for that species in the history of our tour.

The next morning was our earliest—but well worth the sacrifice of a few minutes’ sleep. We were in the blind at the Crane Trust at 6:30 am, listening to the murmur of the tens of thousands of Sandhill Cranes just outside the windows.

As the sun rose, we picked out a white bird, a truly white, huge, thick bird unlike the delicate leucistic Sandhill Crane that had made our hearts skip a beat the day before. This was the real thing, an adult Whooping Crane, two or three weeks early at this latitude. Even at the peak of their migration in April, this is a hard bird to find in Nebraska, and indeed the species had been recorded only once before on this tour.

We followed a celebratory breakfast with the drive south to Harlan County Reservoir, right on the Kansas border. The expected American White Pelicans were present in unexpectedly large numbers; 90 birds is a big flock for March.

Harlan is always a promising site for gulls too, and we added American Herring Gull to our list before ducking south for a few minutes into Kansas, where our state list—comprising a single species, Harris’s Sparrow—was high in quality if not in quantity.

After lunch in Alma, we visited a few of the wetlands in the western Rainwater Basin. This region in south-central Nebraska is one of the continent’s most important waterfowl production areas, and the shallow marshes and lagoons are very attractive to migrants, too. An Eared Grebe was early at Funk Lagoon, and a drake Cinnamon Teal on the outskirts of Holdredge was near the eastern limit of that species’ usual migration route in the state. Prairie Dog WMA gave us more views of its eponymous squirrel, but even this warm spring it was still too early for the owls we’d hoped to find in the dogtown.

We’d set aside the next day to visit the eastern Sandhills, but almost changed our minds when we saw the drizzle falling. It’s as good to be wet in the hills as anywhere else, though, so we drove north—and soon found that we’d left the rain behind and would enjoy bright sunshine the rest of the day. A roadside pond near Burwell was devoid of waterfowl, but the surrounding cedars hosted a flock of some 50 Cedar Waxwings, a bird always worth admiring at length. Southern Holt County’s Swan Lake, in contrast, was paved with ducks, and we enjoyed excellent close views of several species we had only glimpsed up to that point. Surprisingly enough, it was here that we saw the only White-tailed Deer of the week.

Something must have happened while we were at lunch in a local-colorful cafe in Burwell: the afternoon was nearly birdless. We made do with the spectacular scenery of Calamus Reservoir, then visited Fort Hartsuff, where a Red-bellied Woodpecker and a singing Eastern White-breasted Nuthatch were clear reminders of Nebraska’s transitional place in North America’s zoogeography.

We topped off the day with another “bridge watch,” listening to the masses of Sandhill Cranes as they returned once again to the river. Mist and then drizzle chased us back to the motel, but we wouldn’t have passed up that one more chance to witness this ancient spectacle.

The rain had let up by the time we left the next morning, but fog lay heavy over the Platte valley. The Harvard sewage ponds had a good selection of ducks and geese coming in and out of the fog, and what might well have been our largest flock of Snow Geese the entire week passed invisible overhead. But once again we found ourselves going the right direction: by the time we were back in eastern Nebraska, we’d left the unpleasant weather behind and were birding beneath blue skies.

Schram Park looked and sounded like the eastern forest it is, with Tufted Titmice and Carolina Wrens singing away, while yet more Harris’s Sparrows fed on the woodland edge. The small mitigation wetland above Wehrspann Lake, just a few miles away, gave us our last looks at a small selection of waterfowl, and then, already, the airport beckoned.

We’ll be back.

It’s all about water on the Great Plains, and never more so than in early spring, when the great rivers become highways for millions of northbound birds. The Missouri, the Platte, the Dismal, and the Loup were all on our itinerary last week, and repeated visits proved once again how truly Heraclitean these midwestern streams can be at this season: wintering Common Goldeneye one day are replaced by migrant Lesser Yellowlegs the next, and American Tree Sparrows slowly cede the thickets to arriving Field Sparrows.

We started our tour, right on time, with a walk at Wehrspann Lake, one of innumerable flood control reservoirs on the once-deadly Papio. The only thing threatening us, though, was a slightly chilly wind as we watched Eastern Phoebes chase through the grass and a fine mink shadowing a pair of Mallards along the lakeshore. The Eastern Meadowlarks singing from the tallgrass patches were noticeably darker and their vocalizations noticeably thinner than those of the Lilian’s Meadowlarks of southeast Arizona, with which they may or may not be conspecific. Hope sprang with the loud trill of a chorus frog–the only one we would  hear all week.

The next morning found us up and about in Fontenelle Forest, where a singing Hermit Thrush was taking over from a Barred Owl and Carolina Wrens dashed in and out of the dark underbrush. The floodplain forest was less birdy, though waterfowl diversity was gratifyingly high, with large numbers of Lesser Scaup and Blue-winged Teal on the water and Wood Ducks in the trees overhead; an odd sight was a Canada Goose on an apparent nest high atop a tall stump. A couple of Swamp Sparrows and two Rusty Blackbirds were sure signs of spring.

After lunch we set off for southern Sarpy County’s wetlands, with a quick stop at Haworth Park for a look across at the nesting Bald Eagle on the Iowa side (surprisingly, this was the only individual of the species we saw the entire week). Base Lake, nearly empty just a week before, this time was paved with waterfowl, including Hooded and Red-breasted Mergansers, newly arrived migrants. The ephemeral wetlands of the La Platte bottoms had more ducks, mostly Blue-winged Teal, and the first sandpipers of the tour: a Lesser Yellowlegs and several Wilson’s Snipe.

The same intricate patterns that make snipe so hard to see in the grass make them among the most beautiful of all shorebirds when they’re caught feeding–uncharacteristically–out in the open.

That evening we sought the snipe’s even more ludicrously snouted cousin, American Woodcock–and failed. Three birds were audible, just barely, above the wind, but sleet and snow in our eyes kept us from so much as glimpsing their displays overhead at what had always been my fail-safe site. That’s birding–and we would have another chance later in the week anyway.

It felt hard to turn our backs on the east: we just knew that birds were piling up to our south, waiting for a change in the weather. But the siren song of the central Platte Valley was too much to resist, and a couple of hours after we got up, we were admiring the thousands of Sandhill Cranes on the fields and checking through the waterfowl for Richardson’s Cackling and Ross’s Geese.

A walk at Crane Meadows took us to a thicket crawling with Harris’s Sparrows, and the first Field Sparrow of the spring joined them; there aren’t many places in the world where those two species can be watched in the same brush pile! Four American Pipits paused on a sandbar, while two noisy Greater Yellowlegs danced in the channel among the abundant Blue-winged Teal.

Our dinner in Grand Island came complete with a performance by the renowned comedy team Clueless and Surly, but we were too tired to care about anything but our anticipation of the next day’s birding. It started in the parking lot of our hotel, with Canada Geese and dramatic Common Grackles, and continued as we birded our way west along the Platte to Elm Creek and north into the Sandhills.

A stop at Ansley’s town lake threatened for a moment or two to become permanent, but a push and a shove later we were on our way to Mullen. We had just time to check in to our rooms and throw on an extra layer before heading out to the lek, the booming ground of Greater Prairie-Chickens.

This was the same lek we’d visited the week before, but what a difference those few days had made! There wasn’t a breath of wind, and the spirit was so much upon the birds that a couple of them walked right under our schoolbus blind.

We had about 60 dancing males on the lek, which is on hay at the edge of a cornfield; the moaning hoots and drumbeat foot-stompings were nearly constant.

It was one of the best shows I’d ever seen in more than three decades of chicken-watching, and even Mitch–who takes it personal when the birds don’t perform as he thinks they should–was happy with it.

It was another short night, but I don’t think any of us cared. And what a joy it was to wake up a few hours in and find the early morning actually warm. I couldn’t remember another occasion when I’d sat in a Sharp-tailed Grouse blind with no mittens on.

The gloves were off out on the lek, too.

There were as many as nine males displaying at a time, and when a hen ventured onto the floor, the dance became much less ritualized and much more physical; feathers literally flew a couple of times, and I blushed to imagine what the rivals must be saying to each other during the long stare-downs.

I don’t think I’d ever had a more exciting morning with this species, and it was all the better for the fact that everyone else in the group was experiencing it for the first time.

In fact, it was a perfect Sandhills experience all around, from the singing Western Meadowlarks to the lone pronghorn on a distant hillside. Best of all was a pair of Ferruginous Hawks perched together in a blowout; I can never see this species often enough, and it had been a couple of years since I’d seen it in Nebraska at all.

Breakfast was as welcome as it was substantial, just the thing to fortify us for the drive back east–already. No matter what Google Maps says, it’s a long drive, but we made good time and found little, unfortunately, to delay us as we checked some traditionally good crane spots along the way. We were back in Bellevue in time for supper and a second visit to the woodcocks of Lake Manawa.

They treated us better this time, three birds visible against the dusk, one of them maddeningly close as it buzzed from the ground. Soon it was too dark to pick them out overhead, and we hatched a plan: we’d leave the hotel with our bags the next morning and spend a few hours looking for the birds in daylight before heading to the airport.

It was a good plan and a remarkably beautiful morning, but we didn’t manage to find any long-nosed leaf-colored birds. We did lose a year’s growth when a Wild Turkey flushed at intimidatingly close range to land in the cottonwoods above our heads, and the sparrow tally was quite respectable, with a singing Field Sparrow and a couple of really breathtaking Red Fox Sparrows. A Tree Swallow was investigating nest boxes, and thirteen-lined ground squirrels were trilling their high, silvery calls. Prairie spring!

I stood in the Indian grass and soaked up the sun and the warmth, knowing that I wouldn’t find much waiting for me in Vancouver. And then it was off to the airport, dropping my friends at the terminal, returning the vehicle, checking in, and settling in to wait on my own flights home.

And starting the planning for next year.