AgWired

I think it must be getting near spring time if the Sandhill Cranes are flying over Nebraska. Here’s a formation doing a flyover when I gassed up on my way back from Omaha today.

There were countless numbers of birds in the air this morning. According to Wikipedia:

The Sandhill Crane (Grus canadensis) is a large crane of North America and extreme northeastern Siberia. It has one of the the longest fossil histories of any extant bird[1]. But although a 10-million-year-old crane fossil from Nebraska is often cited as being of this species[2], this is more likely from a prehistoric relative or the direct ancestor of the Sandhill Crane but may not even belong in the genus Grus, while the oldest unequivocal Sandhill Crane fossil is “just” 2.5 million years old[3]. Still, this is nearly half as old again as the earliest remains of most living species of birds, which are not known from remains older than the Pliocene/Pleistocene boundary some 1.8 million years ago. As these ancient Sandhill Cranes varied as much in size as the present-day birds, even those Pliocene fossils were sometimes described as new species[4]. Grus haydeni on the other hand may or may not have been a prehistoric relative of the living species, or it may actually comprise material of the Sandhill Crane and its ancestor[5].

The common name of this bird references habitat like that at the Platte River, on the edge of Nebraska’s Sandhills in the American midwest. This is the most important stopover area for the Lesser Sandhill Crane, Grus (canadensis) canadensis, with up to 450,000 of these birds migrating through annually.

I passed a field and stopped for a quick photo to add to my collection.

They all swirled around and around before finally landing in this field off of I-29 right near the Nebraska/Missouri border.