OkcPets Magazine March 2022

14 OKC Pets • March/April 2022 Sandhill Cranes Are Link to Prehistoric Past Winter Quarters Include Oklahoma by Rowena Mills Photographs by Don Brockmeier A s a couple of dozen people waited in hushed expectance in a large viewing blind, it seemed at first that not very many birds were planning to settle down for the night on that stretch of the Platte River. But as a huge sunset deepened to spectacular hues of red, more and more birds whooshed in, landing on the marshy shoreline, vocalizing, walking, dancing — thousands and thousands of them. Sandhill cranes have traveled through Nebraska for ages. Fossils of sandhill wing bones ten million years old have been found in the state. Every year in late winter and early spring, 500,000 sandhill cranes leave their winter grounds in Mexico, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and the western two-thirds of Oklahoma. They stop over in a narrow swath of south-central Nebraska for rest and courtship before going on to Canada, Alaska, and Siberia for the summer. Grazing on waste grain in crop fields, they add about 10 percent of their body weight, building up their depleted fat reserves to com- plete their migration. The sandhills stop in Nebraska in the fall also, but for a very short time and not in large numbers. At that point, they just want to get south where the food is located. Sandhill cranes get ready to take off after resting at the Platte River in south-central Nebraska on their way north.