Crane Songs and Interlopers

In a culture that embraces 7-second videos, erasable Snapchats and 140-character "stories," it is refreshing to stand on a wooden bridge on a warm Spring evening, awaiting a group of birds whose ancestors have been wending their way through Nebraska for, perhaps, millions of years.

Yes, it requires patience, which can be hard for an impatient people.

Oh, and it requires silence, too, which seems much more difficult to honor when a few hundred strangers are lured by curiosity to this structure that spans a narrow channel of the Platte River. 

In many ways, we are like Veruca Salt--We want the world, we want the whooooole world, and we want it now.

Fortunately, what we want matters not a whit to a Sandhills crane, who somehow knows that, tonight, sunset is at 8 p.m.   Not 7:56 or 7:57.  But 8.  Which means that, tonight, it shall swoop and swirl, ever lower to the ground, playing with its mates for a few more minutes before Mother Nature hollers that "It is time to come home NOW!"

And, if the humans have hung around long enough, if we haven't let impatience or basketball scores or thoughts of the warmth of our cars pull us off of that knobby bridge, then we get to watch the cranes come home to roost for the night, burbling their good-nights to one another as they pour from the sky like warm honey, alighting on the sand bars around us.

When we finally turn from the bridge to make the trek back to our cars, catching one more glance of the gathering birds as we do, we realize it wasn't what we'd expected.  It wasn't instant or fast.  It wasn't a head-ducking onslaught or an epic car-chase scene. 

But it was ancient and beautiful, scattered and undulating.  All set against the monastic thrum of avian singing.