By Robert Pore
robert.pore@theindependent.com

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Independent/Lane Hickenbottom Hundreds of thousands of snow geese take flight from a wetland south of Aurora Wednesday. Tens of millions of birds migrate through the area each year. Independent/Lane Hickenbottom (From left) Jonas Davis of Ducks Unlimited, Dianne Kelley of the Rainwater Basin Joint Venture and Ted LaGrange of the Nebraska Game and Parks look out of a blind at Ducks Unlimited-owned wetlands area. Click Thumbnails to View

In perspective, the 70-acre wetland provides a temporary home for as many snow geese as there are sandhill cranes annually migrating through Nebraska during the late winter and early spring.

Rainwater Basin Joint Venture Coordinator Steve Moran said that multitude of snow geese is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the "tens of millions" of migratory birds that stop in south Central Nebraska during the spring.

Much of the migratory craze in Central Nebraska each year focuses on the more than 600,000 sandhill cranes that stop at the Platte River on their way to northern breeding grounds.

But to Moran, the Rainwater Basin, which covers 4,200 square miles in 22 counties, is an undiscovered country for wildlife enthusiasts.

Millions of birds

The Rainwater Basin and the Platte River combine to provide one of the world's greatest wildlife migration extravaganza.

"The landscape is not steep or rough but a rolling hill topology," Moran said. "You'll be driving along a county road, and you pop over just a little bit of a rise, and on the other side, are these wetlands full of snow geese on them. It just springs on you. It has a subtleness to it and makes it kind of undiscovered."

During the migration season, the Rainwater Basin plays host to 7 million to 9 million ducks, 10 million geese and more than 257 different bird species.

"Six hundred thousand sandhill cranes draw an awful lot of attention," Moran said. "But the tens of millions of waterfowl that come through the Rainwater Basin don't get near the attention that the 600,000 cranes do."

And they like corn.

The geese alone may be consuming more than 10 million pounds of corn per day that is left on the fields after harvest, Moran said. That would be the equivalent of more than 1,000 acres of corn with an average yield of 168 bushels per acre.

What makes south Central Nebraska a stopping place for the annual bird migration is its location along the Central Flyway the migration highway birds take to their northern breeding grounds.

But Moran said you won't find too many sandhill cranes in the Rainwater Basin compared to their traditional roosting and feeding areas along the Platte.

"The waterfowl need the wetlands and the wetland plants, and the seeds those wetland plants produce are a primary part of the waterfowl diet, as with the sandhill cranes it is mostly corn, invertebrates, grubs and things like that," he said.

Migration route shift

This stopping-off place for millions of migrating birds wasn't always the case, Moran said.

The migration route has shifted west from Iowa over several hundred years as natural wetlands were converted to farmland.

But wetland habitat has been slowly disappearing in south Central Nebraska. This area had as much as 200,000 acres of wetlands before European settlers converted prairie to cropland nearly 150 years ago.

Now less than 100 significant wetland basins remain in the Rainwater Basin area, which plays host to tens of millions of migrating birds.

The purpose of the Rainwater Basin Joint Venture is to make sure those remaining wetlands are well managed and to work with area landowners to provide more critical habitat.

"It is a challenge because the partners of the Rainwater Basin Joint Venture are attempting to restore wetland habitat in a region of Nebraska that is intensively cropped," Moran said. "It takes a lot of collaboration between the wildlife agencies and the private conservation organizations (such as Ducks Unlimited) to come up with programs and options and incentives for farmers to not crop those wetlands soils."

But slowly that partnership is being forged and new habitat is being added every year.

Moran said managing those wetlands is critical, especially not letting weeds overcome those areas.

"Those wetlands that have management of vegetation, in its early successional stage, are where you see a lot of ducks," he said. "But in those wetlands that don't have that disturbance and are choked with cattails or bullrushes, you don't see any ducks flying out of those wetlands."

Wetlands are managed through controlled burns, grazing and other tools to keep those plants in their early successional stage. Those management practices imitated what nature used to do with wildfires and grazing herds of bison.

Moran said there was a point when the wetlands in the Rainwater Basin had degraded significantly because of a lack of management.

But state and federal wildlife agencies, such as the Nebraska Game and Parks Commission and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service began to pick up their efforts.

"Those management practices have really made a difference," Moran said.

Changing constantly

Ted LaGrange, wetland program manager for Nebraska Game and Parks, said the Rainwater Basin is a "fascinatingly unique landscape."

"For those birds and waterfowl that move through, this is absolutely keystone landscape for them to use as a stepping stone on their way north," LaGrange said. "When they are here, it's absolutely unparalleled to any place in North America."

He said the Rainwater Basin is rich in biodiversity during migration season, which runs from early February through May. As many as 25 species of waterfowl can be viewed, along with about 30 species of shorebirds. There are also threatened and endangered species, such as bald eagle, whooping crane, piping plover, least tern and peregrine falcon.

Year round, at least 150 species make the Rainwater Basin home.

The migrating visitors come in rapid succession, starting with the geese in early February and ending with the shorebirds in May.

"It's changing constantly," LaGrange said. "Almost every day you go out, there's something different."

The Rainwater Basin is a living testimony that man and wildlife can successfully inhabit a landscape together, LaGrange said.

The thrill is driving down a road and seeing hundreds of thousands of geese, wetlands filled with ducks or sandhill cranes feeding in a cornfield along the roadside.

"The landowners are key," LaGrange said. "They control the land and management decisions. It's extremely important that we find ways to work with them and find ways to help this wildlife resource."

Moran said the final measure of a healthy landscape is the presence of wildlife.

"When you can look out and see wildlife and see cranes and see geese and ducks, then you know something is right," he said. "When you look out at a landscape and you don't hear any birds or see any animals, then something is wrong."