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Day of the Crane THE PLATTE IS A CRANE RIvER-a mile wide, an inch deep, and tall with birds. Flowing across Nebraska, it is a wild corridor of sandbars and shallows-a broad prairie stream designed by Providence for the wading and roosting of the lesser sandhill crane. It is a different river than it was last fall. Snowmelt and ice jams have scoured and filled, the braided channels have shifted, and new shoals are building. It is a river of incessant change. But in all the changes there is one constant: the coming of the cranes. They arrive in early March, up from such places as the Bitter Lakes of the Pecos in New Mexico and the Muleshoe Refuge of west Texas, some flying nonstop for 600 miles or more. It was spring when they left; by the time they reach the Platte they are overtaking winter. Here they wait, feeding and courting while spring catches up with them-hundreds of thousands of birds staging for the grand passage into northern Canada and Alaska. Now it's a new day, the sun rising out of a prairie horizon so distant that the roosting cranes cast shadows 30 yards long 155 Day of the Crane nn; P1.ATT1! IS " CU>

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