Nebraska’s sandhill crane migration stronger than ever, despite bird flu worries

The sandhill cranes migration is a yearly tradition in Nebraska. When driving along the stretch of Interstate 80 between Grand Island and Lexington, it can be hard not to see the birds in nearby fields.

This year, they have been facing an uphill battle.

Sandhill cranes have been coming through Nebraska dating back nine-million years, predating the 10,000-year-old Platte River.

People from all around the state, country and world come to see hundreds of thousands of sandhill cranes stop off in central Nebraska to refuel between their long flight from the southern United States and Mexico to Canada.

Mitzi and Ken Lang from Colorado are two of these visitors. They were sitting in one of the Rowe Sanctuary’s riverside blinds, surrounded by the near-constant chatter of the sandhill cranes.

“Last night was our first time,” Mitzi said. “It was beautiful. It was magical."

“We got here a little before sunset,” Ken said. “Got to watch wave after wave of them descend on the sand bars, and they slowly built out toward us until they were really pretty close.”

“It's very noisy. Yeah, it’s great,” said Mitzi chuckling.

Each year, the Audubon’s Rowe Sanctuary in Gibbon, Nebraska monitors the migrating cranes, as well as provides ways that tourists can watch them. Marcos Stoltzfuz is the director at the sanctuary.

“When I looked back at some recent years' visitation, it was really revealing,” Stoltzfus said. “We saw visitors from all 93 counties in Nebraska…from 49 or 50 states and 35 to 40 countries.”

The Rowe Sanctuary was part of an economic study that found the sandhill cranes offer more than just loud squawks and majestic photos.

“We last did a study in collaboration with many partners in 2017, Stoltzfus said. “And they determined that overall, the migration adds about 200 full-time, year-round jobs and about $14 million of economic impact through visitation and tourism.”

Crane Trust is another organization in south-central Nebraska that works to protect and monitor crane populations. Bethany Ostrom is the lead biologist.

“Our last flight was on the eighth [of March], a Saturday, and there were 583,000 cranes in the central Platte River Valley,” Ostrom said. “Some years, that's like the highest, higher than the number we get for peak, but this is still fairly early migration, so we're thinking that our next flight is going to be even more.”

And Ostrom was right, reporting that earlier this week 700,000 cranes were counted, breaking the previous record.

Despite the unprecedented number of sandhill cranes, there has been struggle.

In February, the eastern population of sandhill cranes, which is separate from Nebraska’s mid-continental population, suffered 2,000 deaths from the H5N1 strain of bird flu, something that surprised experts like Anne Lacy. Lacy is the director of Eastern Flyways with the International Crane Foundation.

“This is the first time that we have experienced this kind of die-off in the winter for sandhills,” Lacy said. “So it was, it was pretty shocking.”

While there is little crossover between the eastern population of sandhill cranes and the ones that come through Nebraska, this news worried crane fans and experts alike.

It’s thought that the eastern sandhill cranes got it from migrating geese. Waterfowl, such as geese, are a likely candidate because bird flu can be transmitted through feces, and the cranes tend to flock towards areas with water, a prime place for waterfowl feces to be.

In Nebraska, the crane migration is at the same time as the migration of over 25 different species of waterfowl, which have conservationists concerned.

Separate from the sandhill cranes, experts worry about the whooping crane population, which consists of only about 600 birds worldwide. Whooping cranes migrate alongside the sandhill cranes, and even a few deaths can have a devastating effect on their population.

Now at the peak of the migration, Ostrom said there hasn’t been an outbreak, which she says is partially luck. She also credits the sandhill cranes’ resiliency.

“Sandhill cranes have shown us that they've been super resilient to lots of different things that we've thrown at them,” Ostrom said. “We changed their prairie from prairie to corn, and they adapted to that. We've changed the landscape of their migratory path, and they've adapted to that… Both the sandhill crane population and the whooping crane population have been increasing in the past years. Hopefully that allows for a little bit more resiliency in the potentially troubled times moving forward.”

While there will remain worry, officials believe it's evident that the Nebraska tradition will endure.