NE part 1

Just got back from my yearly visit to Kearney, NE to say hello to several hundred thousand friends who are just passing through town. The annaul crane migration is truly one of the most spectacular things you can hope to see in your life. More than one person has been brought to tears with the sheer number and sound of the birds all moving overhead - either to or from the Platte River. It is going to take a little bit to get through all the photos I took to clean out the undesirables. In the meantime, since I did not have a blog last year, I am going to post just a couple of high points from the past couple of years.

Two years ago, was with a tour group, and we spotted a Common Crane in with the Sandhills. Turns out the bird had been seen 8 years before we had seen it, but had not been seen for 2. The speculation is that this bird had joined the Sandhills somewhere in Siberian breeding grounds, where the two species overlap. You can clearly pick it out here in this group. Apparently, only a couple of dozen sightings of a Common Crane have been recorded in North America.

And then there was the Whooping Crane juvenile who we spotted last year. It had joined up with Sandhills. you can still see some orange plumage to show that it was not quite yet a year old.