Alright y’all, this is a big one! On Monday, 3/17/2025, we estimated 736,000 +/- 55,000 Sandhill Cranes between Chapman and Overton, NE. Do I dare even say that I am confident this was a decent undercount? Monday morning thousands of birds left the river early and were seen flying north over the interstate to go feed before our plane flew over the area. Cranes in these northern fields are often the most difficult to spot as we can confidently survey within about 3km of the river. However, to the north a lot of this buffer zone is taken up by I-80. This is a known limitation of our survey method and we use our data as a “systematic undercount” of the population on the Central Platte River Valley.
This count is an all-time record high for Sandhill Cranes counted in the Central Platte! Interestingly this is also an all-time record for cranes seen east of Hwy-281 (bridge segments 1 and 2). Between Chapman and Hwy-281 out of Grand Island there was just under 500,000 Sandhill Cranes! In the recent past, numbers have been slightly increasing east of the Crane Trust. However, we’ve never seen numbers like this out that direction. In fact, both bridge segments 1 and 2 broke records for most cranes estimated in a bridge segment (segment 1 ~250,000 cranes and segment 2 just under 250,000 cranes). The record was previously held by segment 7 (around Rowe) on 3/26/2019 (week 7), and segment 3 (around Crane Trust) on 3/8/2021 (week 4), both right around 210,000 cranes. We don’t know exactly why these birds are shifting their migration in this way. It could be because space on the river is limited elsewhere as the population increases, river conditions are degrading in other sections due to woody encroachment or decreases in river flows throughout the year, shifts in the climate are causing larger shifts in the greater population of cranes, or something else entirely. Each year sheds light on a different facet of the whole picture.
This is likely peak for the year as we have seen some cranes attempt to leave in recent days. However, because the majority of birds have arrived in the past two weeks we are likely to see decent viewing numbers for the next two weeks as cranes stay in the river valley for 2-4 weeks.
Till next time,
Bethany
