My 10 Favorite Nebraska Birding Spots

The annual Nebraska stopover of Sandhill cranes is world famous, but our state boasts many splendid bird watching opportunities. Paul Johnsgard, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln ornithologist, devoted his life to the field and authored more than 100 books about nature.

Johnsgard died earlier this year. This story he wrote for the September/October 2007 issue of Nebraska Life demonstrates his enduring contribution to knowing and appreciating our wild places.

When Kingsley Dam was constructed in the late 1930s near Ogallala, it impounded Nebraska’s largest reservoir (Lake McConaughy), and formed Lake Ogallala immediately below the dam, as a smaller holding reservoir for diverting irrigation waters. Over the decades, this area of Keith County has gradually developed a bird list that is now the largest of any Nebraska location, with about 340 species, including about 120 known breeders and more than 200 transients.

“Lake Mac” attracts the state’s largest winter population of bald eagles, vast numbers of fish-eating birds such as western grebes and American white pelicans, and a rich assortment of rare gulls, jaegers and waterfowl. It is the state’s prime location for large Christmas Bird Counts, and in spring and summer attracts birders and ornithologists who study its impressive breeding populations of species such as piping plover, least tern and cliff swallow. Long-term studies of the cliff swallow have resulted in the banding of more than 17,000 birds, as well as more than 13,000 birds of other species.

I studied the bird life of this area for 17 years while teaching at the University of Nebraska’s Cedar Point Biological Station (on the south shoreline of Lake Ogallala) from the 1970s until the early 1990s and have had perhaps the most exciting bird adventures of my life there.

This Missouri River refuge straddles the Nebraska-lowa border near Blair and intercepts the flow of bird migrants that pass through each spring and fall. Less forested than Ponca State Park, the refuge centers on a large oxbow lake that was formed when a loop of the Missouri River was cut off. Surrounding the lake is a mixture of hardwood forest, restored grasslands and grain fields planted to attract and feed migrating birds, especially geese.

This management plan typically attracts hundreds of thousands of snow geese each fall. I have seen as many as 500,000 snow geese and ducks in late October and early November, and the early morning and late afternoon flights to and from foraging fields are a delight to the eye.

The modern visitors center has viewing windows directed out toward the lake and also toward the woods where bird feeders have been set out. A drive through the refuge will often turn up deer, opossums, fox squirrels and other mammals, as well as grassland and woodland birds. When I was last there in late March of 2006, barn and rough-winged swallows were busily coursing overhead in search of insects, while dickcissels were singing loudly from brushy roadsides, proving that summer had finally arrived.

This beautiful park is located along the south shoreline of the Missouri River west of Sioux City, Iowa, which by both luck and good planning has remained much like what existed more than 200 years ago when Lewis and Clark passed by on their search for a navigable route to the Pacific.

Named for the Ponca Tribe, which Lewis and Clark befriended but who were later mostly removed to a reservation in Oklahoma, the park is largely covered with a mature hardwood forest including a bur oak that was already a century old when Lewis and Clark passed by. A bird list for the park and the surrounding three-state region includes nearly 300 species, one of the largest bird lists for the Midwest.

When I last visited the park in mid-May of 2006, the trees were virtually festooned with territorial American redstarts, rose-breasted grosbeaks and red-bellied woodpeckers. Whip-poor-wills produced a constant nighttime chorus, and during the day many other migratory and breeding species moved mostly unseen through the thick forest canopy. During a golden sunrise I watched a family of Canada geese slowly paddle upstream, and later saw a male ruby-throated hummingbird perching quietly near a dense stand of spring wildflowers.       

Hummingbird nestings in Nebraska are not quite so rare as hen’s teeth but are more fun to imagine and search for.

This historic federal refuge near Valentine, once a military outpost established to protect settlers from warring incursions by the Dakota Sioux, lies in the Niobrara Valley at the upper end of the 70-mile stretch now designated as the Niobrara National Scenic River.

It is also situated in the middle of a broad ecological transition zone between eastern and western floras and faunas, with a host of both eastern and western birds. There are many confusing bird hybrids between such species as Baltimore and Bullock’s orioles, rose-breasted and black-headed grosbeaks, indigo and lazuli buntings and eastern and spotted towhees.

The refuge is also a place where several types of grasslands occur, supporting good populations of prairie species such as burrowing owls, sharp-tailed grouse, prairie falcons and both eastern and western meadowlarks. The large captive herd of bison and smaller numbers of elk, deer (mule and white-tailed) and pronghorn add spice to the great birding.

Quietly canoeing the river is a great way to get close approaches to such shoreline species as great blue herons, common yellowthroats, spotted sandpipers and yellow­breasted chats.

This vast 40,000-acre refuge, situated in the western sand hills of Garden County, is a grassy treasure that is decorated with a dozen or more large marshes and lakes, plus countless tiny ponds that sparkle like jewels in the summer sun. Only a few sandy roads penetrate the refuge, and even these require some care in driving and parking if one is to avoid being mired in deep sand. There are also no gas stations or cafes closer than 30 miles, so one must think ahead when visiting the refuge.

But these are minor concerns. I have visited Crescent Lake many dozens of times and am always awestruck at the refuge’s great diversity of birds, being second in Nebraska only to Lake McConaughy in total species reported. Its rich array of rare waterbirds includes white-faced ibis, black and Forster’s terns, and Wilson’s phalarope; and unusual or rare ducks such as ruddy duck and cinnamon teal. 

Nearly all of Nebraska’s grassland birds can be found here, with the distinctive calls of long-billed curlews and upland sandpipers often echoing over the grass-covered dunes, and horned larks seemingly flushing from the roadsides at every turn.

Located about 10 miles south of Scottsbluff, this area of nearly 4,000 acres lies in the middle of a long east-west range of ridges and canyons that extend from the Wyoming line east into Morrill County.

Like the rugged Pine Ridge escarpment to the north, the pine covered bluffs of the Wildcats bring many western birds into the state, such as pygmy nuthatch and red crossbill. The nearby North Platte River is a migratory thoroughfare for waterfowl and shorebirds, attracting great numbers of ducks, geese and even sandhill cranes, which were migrating overhead by the thousands when I last visited the area in April 2006.

A modern nature center operated by the Nebraska Game and Parks Commission is a perfect starting point for a two-mile nature trail. Buffalo Creek Wildlife Management Area is located a few miles to the west, where longer trails can be found, and where nests of western raptors such as golden eagles can be seen perched on the steep sides of buttes.

This little-known area, reached via a county road (Sowbelly Road) about 4 miles northeast of Harrison in Sioux County, is a steeply rimmed canyon that makes one imagine being in the Black Hills or the Snowy Range of Wyoming.

Driving down the rather steep and unimproved road into the narrow canyon prior to the terrible wildfires of 2006, one could find such western specialties as cordilleran flycatcher, western tanager and Bullock’s oriole, as well as typical eastern birds such as rose-breasted grosbeak, indigo bunting and American redstart.

A small public access park (Coffee Park) allowed for creek-bottom birding, while white-throated swifts and violet-green swallows would often be seen catching insects high overhead. One could look for prairie falcons gliding along the cliffs and listen for the wonderful fluty songs of the Townsend’s solitaire. Near the bottom of the canyon, I photographed a lovely male rose-breasted grosbeak. It soon perked up and flew back into the surrounding woods.

Monroe Canyon in the Gilbert-Baker Wildlife Management Area (5 miles north of Harrison on a paved county road) offers the only nearly comparable birding opportunities for Black Hills and Rocky Mountain birds in Nebraska.

Burchard Lake in southern Pawnee County is another magical place for me – I have traditionally spent at least one morning each spring watching the dawn displays of greater prairie chickens here ever since the early 1960s. I have shared many sunrises with the prairie chickens, enthralled by their complex behaviors and their seemingly mournful but soothing calls as the males display in unison on a prairie hilltop.

It is a place where time seems to stand still, and where the principle of the survival of the fittest can be observed firsthand, as male prairie chickens fight and display to attain social dominance and to thus gain an opportunity to pass their personal genes on to the next generation. I have often wondered how many of the males I observed during one spring were also there on that same hilltop one, two or even five years earlier, and had seen the little camouflaged pop-tent blind I have used these many decades to observe and try to understand their secret lives.

It is reassuring to be able to go back each spring, to see and hear the same exact behaviors in these birds that I first saw nearly 50 years ago, played out with the same vigor and enthusiasm as when I first saw it, and in exactly the same way. It gives me a sense of great inner satisfaction to know that something in the world is still both infinitely beautiful and changeless, and that so long as prairie chickens can gather safely on a prairie hilltop each spring, Nebraska’s natural world cannot be doomed.

This 600-acre tallgrass prairie in Lancaster County, and an associated nature center, provides some sense of the glory of the prairie as it must have appeared to the first immigrants crossing the plains. Remnants of a branch of the Overland Trail can still be seen here.

Many of the original tallgrass prairie plants (more than 330 species) and birds (more than 190 species) are still present. Among these are a small flock of greater prairie chickens, and a good population of Henslow’s sparrow, a secretive grassland sparrow that is restricted to tallgrass prairies that are sufficiently undisturbed that a good layer of thatch has developed.

Spring Creek is also one of the few places in Nebraska where there is a chance of seeing the Sprague’s pipit, a classic grassland bird that nests in the prairies of the Dakotas and southern Canada but is very rarely encountered during migration.

Every season at Spring Creek has its attractions, but early summer brings out both prairie flowers and prairie birds. ln July of 2006 I spent a few hours on the prairie, nearly stepping on a western meadowlark’s nest, and photographing a female dickcissel that must have felt I was too close to her nest, as she repeatedly popped up into view, watching me from only 10-15 feet away as I slowly walked through a thick stand of smooth sumac. Scenes like this are remembered for a lifetime.

This famous sanctuary and associated nature center near Kearney is the place to go in March and early April to see Nebraska’s greatest wildlife spectacle, the migration of a half a million sandhill cranes (now 1 million), not to mention all the other migrating waterfowl and even a slight chance of seeing a few whooping cranes.

Situated along the largest remaining channel of the historic Platte River, the sunset and sunrise flights of cranes arriving and departing from their nighttime roosts on the river are simply indescribable in their beauty and esthetic qualities. I have seen grown men and women weep from the sheer emotions generated by the sight and sounds of 10,000 or more cranes passing closely overhead, their individual voices joining in a near-deafening chorus that is much louder and more exciting than a massed chorus performing the final movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.

It was this experience, which I witnessed during my first Nebraska spring in 1962, that made me decide that I wanted to spend the rest of my life here.