Liftoff!

(Producer: David Schulman) Every March, close to 500,000 Sandhill Cranes break their long migration with a stop along the Platte River in central Nebraska. For two or three weeks, they spend their days eating and dancing in the cornfields, and their nights roosting, en masse, along the muddy river shallows. Last March, our friend Margery Nicolson led us on a pre-dawn hike to a blind along the banks of the Platte, and within the Rowe Audubon Sanctuary. As dawn finally came, we became aware of tens of thousands of cranes roosting on the river around us. Over the course of an hour or more, the sound of the birds calling to each other slowly grew as more and more became active. Then, in an instant, the moment came â a group of birds to our left took to the air, and within moments thousands, and thousands more joined them in a vast cloud, many of them passing directly over our heads.