A Natural Wonder?

The Sandhill cranes around Kearney seem as if they are from an earlier, unspoiled time when huge flocks of birds and sprawling herds of ungulates roamed the prairies. A time before human beings screwed everything up.

But upon closer inspection, this exuberant explosion of wild life is actually an artifact of human changes to the landscape. The cranes are densely concentrated in this spot precisely because much of the river has been made inhospitable to them. The Platte was once wide, shallow and sandy, just like the cranes like it. They like to stand in the middle on sandbars, out of the way of land predators. But thanks to extensive water use by humans, rough icy spring flows that once sliced off vegetation are no more and much of the river wooded over. The river around Rowe is kept sandy and wide by means of humans operating large vegetation clearing machines.

And no one is quite sure if there are fewer or more cranes than there were before their diet changed from tubers, bugs and lizards to the human-provided feast they now rely on: corn left behind by the combines.

The cranes did their thing for millions of years without us, but we've altered the deal. If humans disappeared tomorrow, what would become of the cranes?

Emma Marris