A Summing Up
I began writing this final essay on Easter Sunday, the last day of March, 2013. I had just returned from a trip to the central Platte Valley for a celebration of spring and one last view of the sandhill cranes before they had all migrated north. Enduring several late winter snowstorms, they finally received the benefits of cloudless skies and a full moon to help them find the landmarks and northern wetlands that they would use for guidance and security on their remaining two-to-three-thousand-mile trips to their tundra breeding grounds. In spite of a cold spring, their departure was unusually early this year, perhaps because of depleted corn supplies in the face of competition for food with geese and a smaller than normal 2012 corn crop.
Of all these annual passages, seeing the cranes arrive and depart is always the most heart-tugging for me. They represent my deepest emotional connection to Nebraska and one of the primary reasons that I decided I wanted to spend the rest of my life here, less than a year after setting foot in the state for the first time in my life. In spite of having grown up less than three hundred miles north of Nebraska’s northern border, I had never entered the state during my first thirty years of life and had acquired only two informal guidelines to help prepare me for what, as a biologist, I might find there. As an undergraduate student at North Dakota State University I had visited the Delta Waterfowl Research Station, west of Winnipeg, Manitoba, to observe its waterfowl research program and visit with its director, H. A. Hochbaum. In one of our discussions he mentioned that, in his view, the Nebraska Sandhills’ wetlands were probably second only to North Dakota’s prairie potholes as the greatest duck-production region south of Canada.
Later, while a first-year doctoral student at Cornell University, I listened with great interest to the experiences of two somewhat more advanced graduate student colleagues. They had engaged in summer field research along Nebraska’s central Platte Valley, determining the amounts of range overlap and hybridization rates among several species pairs of songbirds and woodpeckers. According to them, the riparian forests of the central Platte Valley in May were an ornithologist’s dream, teeming with fascinating and sometimes hybridizing species of orioles, buntings, towhees, and flickers.
Five years later, while finishing two years of postdoctoral research in England, those incidents were on my mind when I applied for, and happily accepted, a teaching position at the University of Nebraska, in Lincoln. Since then, as I have crossed and recrossed nearly every highway in the state (plus uncountable “unimproved” roads and a few unmarked Sandhills trails), I have come to love Nebraska’s scenic and often pristine rivers, its tallgrass prairie remnants as well as its still-boundless Sandhills prairies, its myriad freshwater and alkaline wetlands, and especially its birds and other wildlife.
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During my roughly one-hundred-mile late-March drive to Grand Island to wish the cranes godspeed, I began to worry. I noticed there was still essentially no green vegetation visible from the interstate highway, except around some scattered patches of melting snow in shaded sites. The second year of an exceptionally severe drought had left Nebraska and most of the other Great Plains states with parched fields and mostly dry wetlands. Nevertheless, in 2012 Nebraska’s cornfields produced an only slightly below average crop of about 1.3 billion bushels, thanks largely to more than one hundred thousand center-pivot irrigation systems and a still-bountiful and unpolluted Ogallala Aquifer. Yet nearly all the corn stubble visible from the highway had been cut down at nearly ground level, removing all the aboveground biomass. The resulting nearly barren land offered virtually no food for wildlife, exposed the soil to potentially severe erosion, and promoted desiccation of the subsoil more severely than would have been the case if some vegetational cover had been left behind.
Nebraska is now the country’s fourth-largest consumer of crop insurance, and 75 percent of the nearly $500 million paid out in federally funded indemnity payments in 2012 were the result of claims related to corn. South of the Platte Valley, the Rainwater Basin was nearly dry by March 2013. The subnormal snowfall of the previous winter had not replenished the region’s wetlands, and the Weather Bureau’s forecast for the summer months offered no basis for optimism. In association with the drought, during 2012 Nebraska also suffered one of its worst years in history as to wildfire damage, with almost five hundred thousand acres of grasslands and forests burned across the state. The spring of 2013 was marked by official estimates of extreme to exceptional drought conditions across nearly the entire state.
The years of bountiful annual rains and nearly unlimited extractions of water from both our surface-water supplies and the Ogallala Aquifer are evidently now behind us. In April 2013 Lake McConaughy was at only 66 percent of its capacity, and its spring inflow rates had been at about 75 percent of normal. The snowpack in the North Platte River Basin was then only 79 percent of average, and that of the South Platte River Basin was 83 percent of average. At that time the Central Nebraska Public Power and Irrigation District announced plans to restrict irrigation allotments for its customers to ten inches of water per acre, rather than the usual eighteen inches.
The world is now confronted with threats of global climate changes, foretelling even worse droughts, hotter summers, and international water and energy crises. Even though we know that many of the adverse effects of global warming are caused by the burning of fossil fuel, our state’s senators and representatives are determined to risk Nebraska’s ecological and economic future by allowing a gigantic oil pipeline to be built that will bisect central Nebraska from north to south. In spite of a minor face-saving shift in routing, it is still to be partly situated on a highly sandy base, and only a few feet above the top of our precious and still-unpolluted Ogallala Aquifer. It will cross the Niobrara, Loup, and Platte Rivers, passing through the breeding ranges of the endangered interior least tern and threatened piping plover, run closely parallel to the migration route of the endangered whooping crane, and transect the middle of the known Nebraska range of the endangered American burying beetle. Nebraska’s most prominent politicians probably wouldn’t know a least tern from a U-turn, but they can evidently detect the presence of potential money at great distances.
In spite of such ominous threats to Nebraska’s advertised “good life,” many welcome changes have occurred with regard to the state’s environmental stewardship and its ecological monitoring. The annual Audubon Christmas Bird Counts, begun in 1900, were conducted in Lincoln and Omaha as early as 1909 and in Scottsbluff starting in 1949. Lincoln’s Christmas Count database is now continuous for nearly sixty years and Scottsbluff’s for more than fifty years. A total of about ten to fifteen Nebraska sites now are annually surveyed in Christmas Counts, providing a valuable index to long-term changes in our winter bird populations, as was described in chapter 20.
The value of the Platte as spring habitat for migrating sandhill and whooping cranes has attracted naturalists for several decades. The crane migration was initially celebrated in Grand Island by its Big Bend National Audubon Society chapter in 1970. The celebration was later moved to Kearney and until 2013 was called the Rivers and Wildlife Celebration. This annual celebration, now one of the longest-running in America, has attracted more than eight thousand people over the past four decades and provides a strong catalyst for environmental education and support for protecting the river, the cranes, and associated wildlife.
Thanks to a major bequest from a Massachusetts benefactor, in 1974 the National Audubon Society purchased a riverine strip consisting of about four shoreline miles and more than one thousand acres of mostly prime crane meadow habitat along the central Platte River near Gibbon. The sanctuary was named the Lillian Annette Rowe Sanctuary, in honor of the woman whose generous gift allowed for the area’s purchase, at the very time that efforts by federal agencies to establish a national wildlife refuge in the region through land condemnation had failed miserably.
In 1999 Rowe Sanctuary began a capital campaign to add an education center, and the Iain Nicolson Audubon Center was completed in 2003 by a gift from a California woman, Margaret Nicolson, in memory of her late husband. Centered near one of the largest sandhill crane roost sites in the central Platte Valley, the center attracts about fifteen thousand people annually to see this amazing spectacle, adding to the local economy an estimated minimum of $20 million annually. In 2006 and 2008 an additional six hundred acres were added to Rowe Sanctuary’s riparian wetlands, bringing its total to nineteen hundred acres by 2013. Audubon manages this riverine complex in a way that provides spring staging habitat for whooping and sandhill cranes, as well as nesting habitat for piping plovers and least terns, two other nationally endangered or threatened species.
Shortly after the passage of the 1972 Endangered Species Act, the central Platte Valley was identified as critical habitat for the nationally endangered whooping crane, one of America’s rarest and most spectacular birds. On the basis of this critical habitat designation, the National Wildlife Federation and several other conservation groups mounted a legal challenge against the construction of Grayrocks Dam, being built on a tributary of the North Platte River in Wyoming. That 1978 lawsuit resulted in a $7.5 million mitigation fund. This fund has allowed for the establishment of the Platte River Whooping Crane Habitat Maintenance Trust (now the Crane Trust), headquartered near Grand Island, and the purchase and restoration of critical wet meadow and shoreline habitat on the Platte River between Grand Island and Kearney. Associated lands purchased later by the trust and other conservation groups have helped secure the most valuable remaining wetlands and riverine roosting areas. In 2013 the trust assumed management of the Nebraska Nature and Visitor Center (now the Crane Trust Nature and Visitor Center) at the Alda I-80 interchange near Grand Island, as part of an effort to perform an expanded role in promoting regional environmental education and undertaking ecological research in the Platte Valley, especially on cranes.
In 1994 the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service decided to impose restrictions on central Platte water use to protect the four threatened or endangered species using the central and lower Platte Valley. The restrictions required all users, primarily irrigators, to maintain sufficient water flows to protect these species. As a result, all interested parties, including the Audubon Society, began to negotiate means of achieving these ends. In 1997 a Platte River Cooperative Agreement was initially agreed upon, although it took another decade to iron out all the details.
In 2003 Nebraska’s irrigators challenged the cooperative agreement by contending that the Platte River (which they had largely dewatered and degraded) no longer constituted critical habitat for whooping cranes and that its water management should not be subjected to the restrictions imposed by the Endangered Species Act. As a result, the National Academy of Sciences was asked to evaluate this question. The academy confirmed that the central Platte River still represented critical habitat for whooping cranes and affected the status of three other threatened or endangered species and that the cooperative agreement satisfies the requirements of the Endangered Species Act. That judgment set the stage for an eventual thirteen-year, multistate agreement on the Platte’s habitat restoration and water conservation, which was approved in 2008 by Colorado, Wyoming, Nebraska, and the federal government. This plan allowed, in part, for an expenditure of more than $300 million for the purchase, easement acquisition, and improvement of central Platte wetland habitats and has already been of immeasurable importance to cranes, waterfowl, and other wetland-dependent wildlife.
In 1980, as part of its mission to protect ecologically important lands and waters, the Nature Conservancy purchased fifty-two thousand acres representing about twenty-five riverfront miles on the river’s south side and about eight miles along its north side. In 1985 Senator James Exon introduced a bill to designate a seventy-nine-mile stretch of the Niobrara River Valley as a Nationally Scenic River, an area that centered on the Nature Conservancy’s Niobrara Valley Preserve. After a contentious legislative battle, the act was approved in 1991, and much of the Niobrara’s most scenic reaches are now protected from development and freely open to the public for canoeing, rafting, and other nonconsumptive recreation.
In 2002, 218 acres of Niobrara River shoreline were acquired by the National Audubon Society and turned over to the Nebraska Game and Parks Commission to form the Fred Thomas Wildlife Management Area, commemorating a well-known Omaha World-Herald reporter and longtime advocate of protecting the Niobrara Valley. In the following year, Audubon of Kansas acquired ownership of a five-thousand-acre ranch, the Hutton Niobrara Ranch Wildlife Sanctuary in the central Niobrara Valley, which is being developed as an important site for wildlife conservation, environmental education, and nature appreciation.
Conservation easements coordinated by the Nebraska Land Trust and funded in part by the Nebraska Environmental Trust have also helped to preserve the integrity of the Niobrara Valley. Nevertheless, conservationists have to remain vigilant in protecting the Niobrara Valley from constant political pressures to commercialize this ecologically important region and from other threats to its vulnerable resources. During the record-setting torrid summer of 2012 some thirty thousand acres of the Niobrara Valley Preserve burned as a result of lightning-caused wildfires, producing enormous changes in the forest and grassland vegetation that will persist for many decades. Similar massive forest fires also occurred in the Pine Ridge region, the 2012 fires in total affecting more than 270,000 acres, extending from the central Niobrara Valley west almost to the Wyoming border.
Since 1961 several bird species that have long been absent as breeders in the state have begun to nest again in Nebraska. As noted in chapter 13, with the aid of hacking and nest-site preparation efforts, peregrine falcons have been nesting regularly in Omaha since 1998 and in Lincoln since 2003. Bald eagles returned to attempt nesting in the state within a year after DDT was outlawed in the early 1970s, although the first successful known nesting did not occur until 1991. Bald eagle nests have since been reported in at least sixty-two counties, mostly along wooded river valleys. After a hiatus of nearly a century, greater sandhill cranes have again nested in the state at least intermittently since 1999. Whooping cranes have also responded to habitat improvements along the central Platte River and are now again regularly roosting there during their spring migrations.
In west central Nebraska, nesting by black-necked stilts was reported for the first time in the state at Crescent Lake National Wildlife Refuge during the 1980s, and nestings have since occurred elsewhere in the Sandhills. Marbled godwits have also been found nesting sparingly in the northern Sandhills. White-faced ibises have similarly expanded during the past decade from a few known nesting sites in the Sandhills and Rainwater Basin, and the very similar but more southern-oriented glossy ibis has been increasingly seen and has possibly also nested recently in the state. Likewise, since 2008 ospreys have made nesting efforts on four different nesting platforms in Keith and Scotts Bluff Counties.
Some eastern bird species have moved westward along Nebraska’s increasingly forested rivers, such as the wood duck, red-bellied woodpecker, and Baltimore oriole. Eastern Nebraska’s tiny breeding populations of several deciduous forest-dependent birds, such as the pileated woodpecker, Kentucky warbler, and summer tanager, also seem to be slowly expanding their breeding ranges in the mature forests of the Missouri Valley.
A few western-oriented songbirds have recently moved eastward into the scrublands of Nebraska’s Panhandle from Wyoming and Colorado in recent years, such as the western race of the blue-gray gnatcatcher and the cordilleran flycatcher. Given the prospects of more frequent and more severe future droughts, this west-to-east movement by arid-adapted species is likely to increase. In the winter of 2012–13 there was a major influx of Rocky Mountain finches, crossbills, and evening grosbeaks into Nebraska, probably reflecting poor conifer cone production in the drought-impacted Wyoming mountains.
Several species have expanded their breeding ranges northward into Nebraska since the 1960s, such as the chuck-wills-widow, scissor-tailed flycatcher, great-tailed grackle, and Mississippi kite. Mississippi kites have nested in several Nebraska towns since 1991, including Ogallala, Red Cloud, Benkleman, and Imperial, as part of an apparent northern range expansion. The southern gray-headed race (J. h. dorsalis) of the dark-eyed junco is becoming almost regular in western Nebraska, and some distinctly southern birds, such as the crested caracara, Harris’s hawk, zone-tailed hawk, and hooded oriole, have put in surprise recent appearances.
One important development reflecting cultural changes in attitudes toward wildlife appreciation over the past half century has been the Nebraska Game and Park Commission’s broadened viewpoint as to its statewide mission. In the early 1960s the agency was largely preoccupied with promoting hunting, fishing, and enjoyment of our state parks and other recreational areas. By the start of the twenty-first century it had hired its first nongame biologist, had helped the Nebraska Ornithologists’ Union publish the results of the state’s first breeding bird survey, and had spearheaded the formation of the Nebraska Partnership for All-Bird Conservation (now the Nebraska Bird Partnership, www.nebraskabirds.org). This loose affiliation of conservation-oriented organizations and agencies has energized a cooperative enthusiasm that has produced an online version of my Nebraska Bird-Finding Guide (www.nebraskabirdingtrails.com), developed an interactive curriculum for bird study directed toward children in the fifth to eighth grades (Project Beak, http://projectbeak.org/), and generated an online bird identification guide (the Nebraska Bird Library, www.nebraskabirdlibrary.org), designed to help anybody identify the more than 450 species that occur in the state.
Also of great importance to the preservation of Nebraska’s natural heritage were the passage of Nebraska’s Threatened and Endangered Species Act and the formation of the Nebraska Natural Legacy Project (http://outdoornebraska.gov/), which works to focus conservation efforts on native flora and fauna in the state’s forty biologically unique landscapes.
From a landscape conservation perspective, dozens of new state-owned wildlife management areas and state recreation areas have been established through the efforts of Nebraska’s Game and Park Commission since 1961, bringing the current total of state parks and state historical parks to 19, state recreation areas to 60, and wildlife management areas to 283. Several state parks that include important or unusual habitats have also been established in the past few decades, including Bowring Ranch State Historical Park in 1985, Eugene T. Mahoney State Park in 1991, Ashfall Fossil Beds State Historical Park in 1991, and Smith Falls State Park in 1992. Interpretive centers have been constructed in the Wildcat Hills State Recreation Area, Ash Hollow State Recreation Area, and, in cooperation with the University of Nebraska State Museum, Ashfall Fossil Beds State Historical Park.
Lincoln’s Wachiska chapter of the National Audubon Society was established in 1973 and celebrated forty years of conservation work in 2013. In 1976 it began what would become a statewide raptor rehabilitation program, Raptor Recovery Nebraska. During its first thirty-five years of operation the center treated over fifty-three hundred hawks, eagles, and vultures and nearly five thousand owls, with a return-to-the-wild rate of nearly 50 percent. The treated birds have included all of Nebraska’s eighteen species of hawks, eagles, and falcons, its nine species of owls, and the turkey vulture. In 2013 the center was adopted by the Fontenelle Forest Nature Center in Omaha, helping to strengthen its long-term prospects.
In 1978 Wachiska leased 240 acres of what was once eight hundred acres of historically important tallgrass prairie near Lincoln (Nine-Mile Prairie) from the Lincoln Airport Authority. This effort began a process that eventually resulted in the prairie’s protection through its acquisition by the University of Nebraska Foundation. This action also heralded the start of an ongoing program of Wachiska to preserve tallgrass prairies throughout seventeen southeastern Nebraska counties, either by purchase or through conservation easements. The first of these prairies, the five-acre Henry Wulf Tallgrass Prairie near Lincoln, was protected by a conservation easement in 1994. Since then, twenty-one additional prairies in the seventeen-county region have been protected under conservation easements. Five prairies, totaling more than eighty acres, have been acquired by Wachiska, as has a four-hundred-acre farm that is gradually being reverted to prairie. Efforts are underway by the Wachiska chapter to provide educational opportunities for schoolchildren on all these prairies, which sometimes support as many as three hundred or more plant species and hundreds of species of invertebrates and vertebrates.
A major step in prairie conservation and education was made in 1998, when Nebraska’s Audubon Society purchased the 610-acre Kathy O’Brien Ranch in southern Lancaster County. This rare tract of virgin tallgrass prairie, now named Spring Creek Prairie Audubon Center, was expanded by 26 acres in 2000, by 16 more in 2003, and in 2007 an adjoining quarter-section was obtained, bringing the prairie’s total acreage to 808. Nearly 50 more acres were added in 2013. Nearby prairies under conservation easements bring the overall area of locally protected grasslands to nearly 20,000 acres.
In 2005 construction began on a new education center at Spring Creek. This building opened in 2006, and within a few years was attracting upwards of ten thousand people yearly. As described in chapter 6, in 2009 Spring Creek Prairie began a ten-year Prairie Immersion Project, during which half of all the several thousand fourth-grade students in the Lincoln Public Schools visit Spring Creek Prairie. The others visit a similar relict prairie at Lincoln’s Pioneers Park Nature Center, which celebrated fifty years of nature education in 2013.
One of the most significant events in the protection of Nebraska’s natural environments during the past half century was the establishment in 1992 of the Nebraska Environmental Trust, using proceeds from state gambling profits. The trust’s stated mission is “ to conserve, enhance and restore the natural environments of Nebraska.” During its first decade of existence, and in spite of regular efforts by special-interest groups to divert its funds to other purposes, the trust distributed about $40 million to environmental causes. Who said gambling is all bad?
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The wintering bald eagles, snow geese, and other arctic-bound geese had mostly left Nebraska by the end of March 2013, the geese tracing fine, wavering lines across the sky almost throughout the day or revealing their passage from elevations too high for my slowly weakening eyes to detect them. In mid-April I was viewing greater prairie-chickens and sharp-tailed grouse performing their spectacular displays on their “lekking” grounds in the Nebraska Sandhills, and by early May I was observing migrant shorebirds and songbirds. Where else but in Nebraska could a naturalist find a more fulfilling life?
At one time early in my University of Nebraska career I thought that, if I lived that long, I might learn enough about the state’s ecology, plants, and wildlife to write a book about a few of them. A half century later, I now know that I will never be able to describe all of the great stories that could be discovered among Nebraska’s biological attractions. Those stories that are told on the preceding pages reflect only a few facets of the state’s hidden natural treasures, as seen by a single person; it remains for others to pursue their own dreams and to pass on their knowledge and achievements to still another generation. It should be clear from this brief review of what has transpired during Nebraska’s last half century that there are hosts of Nebraskans willing to continue our collective goals of resource conservation and environmental appreciation well into the future.