EARLY-MORNING WATER BIRDS

     Every early morning from mid-February through to March 9, 2024, I watched the majestic, exciting migrant water birds on the Platte River in Audubon's Rowe Sanctuary in the beautiful prairie of southcentral Nebraska because of a live camera and our home computer screen.  Those birds are always thrilling to see getting awake, stirring, their eyes reflected by outdoor lights, limbering and exercising their wings, and, finally, taking flight to harvested grain fields to feed on grain scattered on the ground. 

     Early each morning in the middle of February, I noticed thousands of majestic snow geese of both color phases first on the flats of the Platte where they rested overnight in relative safety.  But I soon saw thousands of elegant, four-foot-tall sandhill cranes standing on the flats and in the flowing shallows of the river.  There they roosted overnight, with each bird tucking its head under a wing.

     As the geese and cranes stirred awake, I heard the voices of both species mingling wildly and loudly in the still, mostly dark early-morning.  I noticed that both species roost close to each other on the flats and shallows.  Perhaps they do that for mutual protection, or both kinds recognize better roosting places and compete for them, bringing them together overnight.       

     Soon the handsome snow geese and sandhill cranes take flight in great, ear-splitting flocks to the fields on the Nebraska prairie.  Wave upon noisy wave of both kinds are silhouetted darkly before the brightening morning sky.  And soon those fast-moving waves become distant, dark scribbles and smudges scattered in all directions across the sky and gone, until those birds return again to roost early that evening.

     Meanwhile, flocks of attractive, shallow-water ducks, including northern pintails, mallards, American wigeons and green-winged teal, are on flats and shallows, and fill the air each morning from late February, through March.  Flocks of ducks really race along in the air, many of which are several stream-lined drake pintails chasing a hen pintail to "win her heart". 

     The drakes of these ducks, and other duck species, are handsome to attract females of their kind to themselves for mating.  Hen ducks of all species are brown and darkly-marked, which camouflages them, a necessity when incubating eggs and raising ducklings.

     Several stately bald eagles of all ages are seen along the Platte in Rowe Sanctuary.  Most of them are there to either kill and eat other kinds of water birds, or to scavenge the remains of the already dead.  Sometimes, a few eagles gather at a carcass to get what they can.    

     During February, March and into April, the Platte River in southcentral Nebraska is the scene of much enjoyable excitement and beauty.  It is truly wonderful and inspiring to see so many thousands each of snow geese, sandhill cranes and puddle ducks there at once, filling the waters, flats and skies.  But by early April, most of those species have moved farther north, or west, to their nesting territories.

       

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