Pidge,those photos are absolutely beautiful and brought tears to my eyes. Birds can do that and also so can music which was gorgeous in this particular slideshow.This is so very timely because I'm reviewing a novel,The Echomaker,for a group of people. It deals with 2 themes..the Capgras syndrome,a psychological condition,and also the sandhill cranes in Nebraska. This site is priceless and I'm going to have everyone look at it before we meet. Thanks for sharing this.

Well, you can come to our area in about 6 weeks and look at approx. 500,000 of them. The noise that many birds make is the most eerie thing you can imagine. Because the Platte at this location is almost dry, they will probably be a few miles east of here where the river still has water in it. We will be ready for the influx of bird watchers from all over, many foreign countrys too and most will have expensive looking binoculars around their necks. The motel and restaurant business will be good for about a month.

Marda, those two themes sound so unlike each other. I'd be interested in having your take on the parallels the author draws. Your comment made me think of The Maytrees and the relation between the landscape and what happens to the people in it.

Gandle, you may have seen millions of these birds, but they are rare here. Even my birding son has only seen one in his lifetime and that was a decade ago over the Cape May marshes in New Jersey. So I'm not surprised that so many people come to see and study them. Also, it's only the expensive binoculars that let you see as much as is possible. So I'm not surprised that that's what birders use, either--I don't even want to ask what my son paid for his but I know he depends on them in his birding activities.

After watching a bit of the sideshow...and I use that word deliberately...on the tv news channels, this is so refreshing. Thanks, Pidge. josh

I saw them while on a business trip to Nebraska about 20 years ago. Up until then, I had no idea about them or their migratory habits, so it was a bit of serendipity stuck into the middle of a rather boring trip. The sight of thousands of these birds in flight & coming to land in the wetlands just took my breath away.