PINTAILS AND SANDHILLS AT ROWE SANCTUARY

          Spring is born from the chilly womb of winter.  I've been watching Audubon's Rowe Sanctuary on the Platte River in southcentral Nebraska through a live camera on site and our computer screen from mid-February to the middle of March of this year.

     The Platte River at Rowe is broad and shallow, with several braids of river among many bare mudflats and flats covered with tall, beige grasses.  Both the deep, overgrown shores of the Platte at Rowe are mostly covered by tall, beige grass, broadly positioned between the river and rows of gray trees behind the grass.  All this creates a natural, wild look as when this area was wild prairie.  Rowe Sanctuary is a beautiful place.

     Not surprising, I saw few birds and mammals when the Platte was frozen "wall to wall" in mid-February of 2023.  However, I was excited to see a few each of white-tailed deer, and scavenging bald eagles and coyotes on the ice, grassy flats and overgrown river banks.

     But when the weather warmed by late February, flocks of tundra swans, Canada geese, snow geese and ring-billed gulls took turns in briefly visiting Rowe Sanctuary, creating much excitement.  Nothing says spring like flocks of northbound swans, geese, gulls, and, a bit later, sandhill cranes.  Birds of all these species rest and feed there before moving on to their nesting territories. 

     Feathered stars on Platte River in Rowe Sanctuary in March of 2023 were over a half million sandhill cranes, as usual, and thousands of northern pintail ducks.  Great, noisy flocks of cranes dominate Rowe Sanctuary every dawn and dusk through March, and the pintails did so through each day for a few weeks, at the same time, until they moved on to the prairie pothole country of central North America to raise ducklings.             

     Every cold dawn and dusk through March, and into April, hundreds of thousands of sandhill cranes in spell-binding masses, and silhouetted black against lovely sunrises and sunsets, create exciting, inspiring, aerial spectacles when leaving and coming to the flats and shallows of the Platte where they rest overnight.  And through it all, including on the river overnight, it seems that every crane shouts boisterously to its fellows.   

     At dusk, flocks of cranes are first spotted in the distance as many dark scribbles in the sky.  But those scribbles rapidly fly over farmlands of the prairie and toward the Platte as other black ribbons come out of the sky from behind.  And then more and more threads of cranes come off the prairie fields and toward the Platte.  Soon the sky over that river is filled with large, noisy birds in many swirling masses that eventually settle on the river for the night. 

     A few kinds of dabbling ducks, including mallards, American wigeons, green-winged teal and northern pintails rested on the river and its flats through March.  But the pintails in their thousands dominated those puddling ducks.  

     The most intriguing part of pintails at Rowe, and everywhere in spring, is their dashing courtship flights that are exciting to see.  Four or five drake pintails court a female pintail on the water.  But soon the hen and her suitors take wing in racing, twisting, seemingly reckless flight for a few minutes over water and land.  Then they swoop down to the water again.  I've read that the drake that keeps up with her in flight becomes her mate for the season.      

     Lovely Rowe Sanctuary along the beautiful Platte River, and its overgrown shores, are exciting with the spectacles of thousands of migrating sandhill cranes every March into April.  And this year there was the more exciting because of the thousands of staging, courting northern pintails.  Rowe Sanctuary is a place to watch every March.   

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