It's been called "The Great American Desert," with a less-than-subtle note of derision.  But the comment betrays a lack of subtlety on the part of the commentator, because while the mountains may shout and the seacoasts roar, the prairie whispers.  You have to pay attention.  Clearly, south central Nebraska is part of the private collection of a superior artist, the images saved for the cognoscenti with the more-developed level of consciousness, those prepared to see beyond the featured lots in the catalog. 
    In the chill of the hour before dawn, I sat in a pickup truck with Brad Maul, an undergraduate at the University of Nebraska-Kearney.  We were waiting to catch the mating dance of the lesser prairie chicken: a garish affair, during which the male puffs up a crimson throat sac and struts about seeking to attract some predictably blasé female.  We were on a dirt road alongside the huge Taylor family ranch, started by ancestors who felt the rolling grasslands would be ideal for raising sheep.  It was beef, however, not lamb, that prevailed here and much of the prairie was converted to cornfields, much of that becoming feed corn.
    As the light broke over the sand hills to my east, we sat by an old sheep meadow, waiting like wallflowers to watch, hands folded in our laps, for the dance that did not come.  I guess the mating dance the day before had been productive and they were sleeping in this morning.  But I had no inclination toward disappointment.  To the north and south of the road, the grasslands were turning shades of warm colors in the rising sun and, while my eye was initially drawn to the blazing ball of orange creeping above the hills in the east, it was the soft brush of pink on the opposite horizon and the swath of powder blue above it that held me transfixed.  Really, the prairie chickens would have been a distraction, would have been simply a foreground to what was, in fact, the real show. 
    Amazing. 
    There just ain't nothin' plane about the plains. 
    Which brings me to the cranes.
    (Apologies, 'Enry 'Iggins.)
    This land, at the edge of the sand hills, was once endless stretches of grass of different heights, colors and blooms; much of it now pushed aside by all those fields of corn.  But, it is the loose kernels in all those cornfields, along with entrées of various small creatures, that attract the leading attraction in this area, from late February to
mid-April: upwards of a half-million sandhill cranes. The cranes return to an 80-mile stretch of the Platte River here in central Nebraska to refresh themselves on their long migration north.  They fill the horizon with their flapping wings, the air with their rich, rolling calls.  As many as 90% of the world's known population of this species pass through here. They come, pausing for six weeks on the fertile wetlands along this

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