Nebraska photographer's book chronicles whooping cranes' journey
Twenty years ago, Nebraska conservation photographer Michael Forsberg published a book chronicling the lives and travels of sandhill cranes, the tall, smoke-gray birds that gather by the tens of thousands each spring along the Platte River in central Nebraska.
He followed "On Ancient Wings" with a volume on the grassland ecosystem that makes up America's Great Plains and then dove into tales of a watershed with Platte Basin Timelapse , the ongoing storytelling project he co-founded.
Now Forsberg has come full circle, tracing the migrations of the endangered whooping crane, the rarest of the world's 15 crane species and another seasonal visitor to the Platte, in a new book called "Into Whooperland ."
Forsberg will describe his journey and sign copies of the book Oct. 15 at Omaha's Lauritzen Gardens. The 7 p.m. event is free to members and $15 for nonmembers. Reservations and tickets are available on the gardens' website, . While he raised the funds to support the field work behind the 224-page volume, the International Crane Foundation served as his nonprofit sponsor.
Forsberg said telling the story of whoopers ties together everything he's worked on over the years. The birds themselves connect entire landscapes, primarily grasslands and wetlands that are important to hundreds of other species — and to humans.
The aim is "to get people to care about these birds and protect them, and to protect all these other creatures under that umbrella," he said. "You're also going to protect us, because we need healthy grasslands and wetlands, too."
Every spring and fall, the roughly 540 birds in the main wild, migratory flock of whoopers navigate a narrow, roughly 2,500-mile flyway between their wintering grounds on the Texas Gulf Coast and their nesting area in the remote boreal forests of Canada's Northwest Territories. Along the way, they make vital stops for food and rest in the Great Plains, including Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska and the Dakotas.
Forsberg said whoopers represent both a remarkable conservation success story and a cautionary tale about the work that remains to be done.
By the early 1940s, hunting and habitat loss had narrowed their numbers to around 20. A series of conservation laws, plus an army of people dedicated to their survival, have helped them claw their way back, he said. Today, about 830 of the birds live in wild and captive flocks.
To tell the stories of the birds and those people, Forsberg traveled roughly 50,000 miles, capturing about 100,000 images and 50 hours of video over the course of about five years.
He spent eight straight days in a blind in Canada's Wood Buffalo National Park, watching a pair of the 5-foot-tall birds hatch their tennis ball-size eggs. The parents usually hatch two chicks, but only one typically survives the first year. The chicks grow quickly. Within about four months, they have to be ready to follow their parents on the journey south, learning both the route and the lessons they'll need to survive along the way.
Forsberg also followed the birds along the Gulf Coast, visiting wintering grounds centered in and around Aransas National Wildlife Refuge . Then in spring 2022, he and pilot Christopher Boyer flew the whoopers' route back north in a 1957 Cessna kitted out with multiple cameras to capture the landscape from their aerial perspective. They flew at the same altitude as the birds and figured out where to stop for food and fuel and wait out bad weather along the way just as the birds do.
He also worked with a telemetry partnership that has tagged and tracked the birds since 2011. That allowed him to tell more intimate stories of individual birds like the female he calls Husker Red because her red and white leg bands are the same colors sported by his alma mater, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
"There's a whole host of birds I like to say I've gotten to know, because I've photographed them on wintering grounds, on nesting grounds and on migration," he said. "I've seen them in these different places and each has their own unique story."
The whooping crane stories won't end with the book, however. Platte Basin Timelapse, a partnership with UNL, is working with a number of groups to launch a companion website called the Whooping Crane Chronicles. It will house more stories, a lot of video, a podcast series and images from a dozen timelapse cameras placed in key habitat up and down the flyway. It also will feature essays written by whooping crane scientists and conservationists.
"We just want to lift up their voices and lift up all these landowners and other people ... who have had these intimate experiences with these birds and let them share why they're important to them in their own way," he said.
The website, whoopingcranechronicles.com , will launch on Oct. 31, Halloween. And yes, there's a story behind that launch date, which Forsberg recounts in the book.
On Halloween Eve, when his daughter, Elsa, was 10, she asked if she could trade a night of trick-or-treating for a bird-watching outing. She wanted to go see cranes, which sometimes stop on the Platte River in the fall as well as in the spring. The pair drove two hours to the river and set up in a blind. They watched ducks at sunset, and suddenly, a family of three whooping cranes flew by and landed about 100 yards upstream.
Since then, he and Elsa Forsberg, now a biologist with the Nebraska Game and Parks Commission, have gone bird-watching nearly every Halloween.
Forsberg, however, insisted that he is just the bearer of such tales.
"You've got to let people in in order to tell the story ... because not everybody gets a chance to do what I get to do," he said. "But it's not about me, it's about everybody else. It's about these birds that through ... a series of miracles are still here, and the stories they have to tell and (those of) the people who have worked with them to keep them on this planet. They're heroes."
, 402-444-1066, twitter.com/julieanderson41
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