Sandhill Cranes and the Platte River

Coming home from several days of meetings in Kearney, Nebraska, my wife and I took a short detour away from the interstate highway to travel along some of the backroads.  We were looking for cranes. Sandhill cranes.  And we found them - lots of them.

Did you know that there are fossils of sandhill cranes that are 2.5 million years old? (There's even one in Nebraska that is nearly 10 million years old, though whether that one is a sandhill crane or another earlier species is debated...)


Without a better zoom lens this was as close as I could get without spooking them.

We also stopped so I could take a few more pictures of the Platte River, and while stopped I found a pile of bird bones (Hawk, I think). I pulled out the largest and least broken of them and brought them home for my son (he's into that sort of thing).