Hey all!
Ope! Hope I didn’t spook ya (or should I say Whoop ya!) with this out-of-the-Boo blog
post—but I wanted to keep y’all in the Whoop (I mean loop) that we’re kicking off fall crane flights this week!
The last few fall migrations have been interesting here along the Platte River. A typical fall season isn’t exactly Spooktacular—with “peak” numbers only reaching a few thousand cranes, if that. Most Sandhill Cranes skip the Platte as a staging ground in the fall, unlike their famous spring stopover. Instead, they tend to stage farther north in places like Saskatchewan and North Dakota.
In fact, three of the five Sandhill Cranes we’ve banded this year have been staging up north for weeks (see their migration here). When cranes do reach Nebraska in the fall, many simply keep flying south—just like the other two banded cranes, which are already settled at their wintering grounds.
Last year was an especially remarkable one. Around 50,000 Sandhill Cranes were reported in mid-November, and about 17,000 of them stayed all winter—the first time in recorded history that more than 5,000 Sandhills overwintered on the Platte!
While these numbers were surprising, they’re not entirely unexpected. In recent years leading up to fall 2024, we’ve seen a steady increase in cranes staging along the Platte and lingering later into winter. With this apparent shift in migration and wintering behavior, we decided to start conducting fall crane surveys similar to our long-running spring surveys.
You might remember we attempted these fall surveys last year but ran into several
challenges—weather delays, plane issues, and scheduling conflicts among them—so we weren’t able to complete all the intended flights. This year, we’ve worked out the kinks and are hopeful things will run much more smoothly!
We’ve already noticed the start of “fallgration” with thousands of Sandhill Cranes seen and heard flying overhead. So far, very few have stopped along the Platte, but we expect to see more cranes—including Whooping Cranes—in the coming days and weeks. The exact timing, of course, will depend largely on weather conditions.
We’ll be sure to keep you posted as the flights progress.
Until next time,
The Crane Counter and Forsbird
(Bethany Ostrom and Elsa Forsberg)