I’ve seen a quarter million Sandhill Cranes massed on the Platte. I’ve watched Club-winged Manakins twitch and click in Ecuadorean forests. And I’ve gasped at Greater Flamingos turning the sky of Provence orange.

But nothing can beat the prairie grouse. No matter how often I get to witness the springtime foolery of Greater Prairie-Chickens and Sharp-tailed Grouse, it moves me and amuses me and brings me into contact with a nature that most of the world’s human population–including many who live within a quick walk of the birds’ dance floors–never even imagine.

Uncharacteristically, the sharp-tails let us down last weekend. A single, rather stolid bird was with the prairie-chickens at the edge of the lek we visited Friday afternoon; and Saturday morning, much smarter than their human observers, the sharp-tails flew in at dawn, stared at each other for an hour, and flew off as the rain started to turn to sleet.

The chickens made up for it.

I was amazed to see birds everywhere as we approached Mitch’s schoolbus blind, feeding in the stubble and the native grassland, perching on the center pivots, flying back and forth in small stiff-winged flocks. As we watched and waited, 80 Greater Prairie-Chickens, perhaps 100, gathered around the lek. Many of them sought shelter from the vicious wind next to and underneath the blind, giving us some astonishingly close views.

It took a while, but eventually the adult males gathered on their booming ground and started to dance.

Every few minutes a hen would fly in and walk, apparently disdainful, through the lek, while the males chased her, booming and strutting. We didn’t see any copulation, but won’t be long now until they are enthused with the divinity of spring.

The wind kept us from fully enjoying the aural portion of the display. We could hear the eerie, low-pitched hooting that is so different from Lesser Prairie-Chicken’s gurgling cackles; but the rapid foot-stomping that is my favorite part of the Greater display remained seen and not heard, no matter how close the dancing males came to us.

As always, I was struck anew by how utterly unbird-like the chickens are when they bow and strut at each other.

We could have spent the rest of the night watching and listening to the dance–especially those of us outfitted with oversized hunting booties. (Yes, that’s a shoe!)

But too soon the chickens decided that it was time for their supper, and like their barnyard brethren, began to pick and peck in the stubble around the bus, stopping for an occasional preen.

And then it was over. The last persistent males left their jealously guarded territories on the lek to join the rest of the flock in the sheltered valleys, and we returned to Mullen for an excellent dinner and a short night.

It’s March that’s supposed to be so capricious on the Great Plains, but our early April visit proved that month just as mercurial. It’s not that the temperatures were ever all that cold–it was 60 F when we landed in Omaha last Thursday, and in the high 20s at its worst–but the wind and the snow and the sleet and the general rawness of it all reminded me, forcefully, of why I make my home in good old AZ!

None of which, I hasten to add, is to suggest that here weren’t birds. In fact, we tallied a quite respectable 95 species in two and a half days, and the list would have gone higher had we not for the most part been limited to those birds, like this lovely and fluffed-up Horned Lark, that the late-season blizzard drove to the roadsides.

But what roadsides, and what birds! We had outstanding looks at Harris’s Sparrows in the flocks of Dark-eyed Juncos and American Tree Sparrows that lined the country roads, and American Robins were impressively thick just about everywhere we looked. Most were males, as expected at this season.

I made a bit of a fool of myself in exulting over this spectacular thrush, but you have to remember that robins are a high-mountain specialty in southeast Arizona, and to see them in their springtime hordes on fields, lawns, and roadsides is always a blast from the distant past for me.

Our morning’s visit to Fontenelle Forest, in horizontal sleet and snow, discovered that robins weren’t the only turdid arriving in numbers.

Hermit Thrushes, uncommonish anywhere in Nebraska, were abundant wherever the snow had melted a bit. Our estimate of more than 20 was certainly low, but was still as surprising as our 30+ Red Fox-Sparrows and 15+ Golden-crowned Kinglets. An eastern Winter Wren was singing near one of the boardwalks, and even let himself be glimpsed. Looking glum were two gorgeous alternate-plumaged male Myrtle Warblers, a taxon I don’t see that often these days and almost never in their spectacular blue and yellow plumage.

Rainy days and wind drive birds to the roadsides and birders to water.

Lake Manawa, a large oxbow (now) just across the river in Iowa, was nicely covered with ducks, mostly Lesser Scaup and Northern Shovelers, but we also found an early Red-breasted Merganser and representatives of just about every other waterfowl species common in the Midwest. As I was making a vain effort to scope the distant flock of Snow Geese for other species, suddenly a white breast and a black head appeared: Common Loon!

And in magnificent breeding plumage at that, riding the frigid waves as if it had never left its oceanic wintering grounds. One of those times when I relish being wrong: I’d said early in the weekend that we were very unlikely to run across any loon of any species.

So many birds and so many species offered consolation: it truly was a spring storm, one that would not last and would finally–after I’d left!–give way to better weather. The true rainbow promise was provided by a bird that few people think of as the harbinger of spring.

Yellow-shafted Flickers were everywhere all weekend, from suet feeders in the southeast to the treeless reaches of the Sandhills. This more than any other is the bird that says spring to me, no matter how leonine the April weather. To hear them laugh and kyeer from oak forests above the Missouri River is to know that we were just a week off in our visit to “springtime” Nebraska.

Nebraska last month was snowy and cold, but Thanksgiving Day itself the sun peeked out for a couple of precious afternoon hours.

Classic midwestern winter weather for classic midwestern winter birds. Eastern Nebraska was having a notably good finch incursion, and Carolyn’s feeders were benefiting, with large numbers of American Goldfinches and Purple Finches.

Though they had been reported here and there, no grosbeaks or crossbills had arrived at her feeders by the time we left; we did get to see the first Pine Siskin of the fall, though, a shy little bird trying to pass as “just” another Purple Finch.