Platte River Buffet

Sandhill cranes stop in Nebraska to eat. To get from the Platte to their nesting grounds in the far North--as far north as Siberia for some of them--cranes must add 20% to their body weight. With the average Lesser Sandhill weighing in at five to eight pounds, according to the Rowe sanctuary, each bird must pack on between one and and two pounds in just a few weeks.

It is frustrating to all of us that so little is known about how these birds lived before the introduction of agriculture into the area. These days, cranes get 96% of their food from cornfields, where they eat virtually nothing but corn. See here. In this, they are perhaps not so different from humans. As journalists like Michael Pollan are increasingly making clear, processed food in this country is likely to be made of corn and corn syrup, and nearly all our meat is fed on corn. See here. Pollan and others argue that this is bad for us. What wonder if it is bad for the cranes.

Sure, they still do a bit of foraging in wet meadows for tubers, snails, and sedge, which were presumably their ancestral food. But at 4% of their intake, isn't that a bit like the parsley that comes with your corn-fed hamburger and corn-syruped soda? We're still looking for more information on what effects the cranes' new diet might have on them.

Emma Marris