Alumni

Nebraska’s Sandhill Crane Migration Bridges the Gap between Classroom Studies and the Natural World

By William Moskoff
 
One of the great challenges of teaching is to make the connection between the classroom and the real world. There is nothing more satisfying than seeing the lightbulb go on in a student’s head when it all comes together.

At the end of March 2004, 19 Lake Forest College students went to south-central Nebraska for three days to witness the annual spring migration of 500,000 Sandhill Cranes along the Platte River, probably the greatest migration spectacle in the continental United States. (Nebraska is also home to a number of other interesting species that cannot be seen in Illinois, such as the Greater Prairie Chicken).

The group who traveled to Nebraska in March was mostly comprised of students enrolled in the Wildlife in North America course team-taught by professors Jeffrey Sundberg (Economics) and Ben Goluboff (English). The participants were joined by several of Professor Caleb Gordon’s (Biology) students as well as others majoring in Environmental Studies. The opportunity to see the Sandhill Crane migration was so attractive that several other faculty and staff paid to go along.

The 700-mile trip to Nebraska was the brainchild of Sundberg. “We talk a lot about wildlife in this course, and it’s actually nice to see some,” he said. The trip also afforded a chance for the students to view a number of the habitats that they had been reading about, particularly the Great Plains and Tallgrass Prairie, a once-dominant habitat type in the Midwest that has all but disappeared.
 
Sundberg said that the trip was a great opportunity to “consolidate learning” — that is, take the things that students had been reading about and observe them in the field. And the trip was also a way to build camaraderie within the program. Since Environmental Studies recruits faculty from departments or hires part-time faculty, majors do not have the natural departmental home enjoyed by most students, and the trip was seen as a way to build cohesion.

The excursion was funded entirely by the MacKenzie Fund for Environmental Studies, an endowment to support the major established by alumna Deborah MacKenzie ’85.

While Environmental Studies dates from the 1970s, the program was largely focused on the sciences for most of its history. About ten years ago, the curriculum was radically altered; courses were added in both the humanities and social sciences, and a sophomore and senior seminar are now taught on an annual basis. In the past, the program consisted of just one or two majors, but it has gained so much popularity among students that there are now about 25. Today, Environmental Studies draws on faculty from Biology, Chemistry, Economics, English, Philosophy, Politics, Religion, and Sociology and Anthropology.

The three-day journey, which began early on a Friday morning, made its first stop at the Neal Smith National Wildlife Refuge in Iowa. There, the group had a lecture/tour of a 4,500-acre property devoted to Oak Savanna (a habitat type that is a mix of grassland and woodland) and Tallgrass Prairie restoration. The group also saw some of the 40 Bison and 25 Elk that live on the refuge.

Saturday was the main event. The group arrived on the banks of the Platte River at 5:30 a.m. in the midst of a violent thunderstorm to watch the Sandhill Cranes leave their roosting site on the river at dawn and disperse to local farm fields to spend the day foraging.

The students and the rest of the party spent a great deal of time huddled under a road bridge trying to survive the driving rain. When the storm finally subsided, everyone was treated to the astonishing sight of thousands of Sandhill Cranes roosting on the river. In the late afternoon, when it was dry but considerably colder, the group stood on a viewing bridge waiting for the Cranes to return to their evening roost on the river. Again, everyone watched countless thousands of birds and heard their primeval call as they made their way back to the water.        
           
Lisa N. Yee ’04, an Environmental Studies and Biology major from Niles, Illinois, said that seeing this many birds was a “powerful experience,” adding that she got “a good snapshot of their life.” 

Eric W. Heyboer ’05 from Littleton, Colorado, also an Environmental Studies major, said, “Although we had to battle the elements, it was a minor inconvenience compared with the opportunity to see so much wildlife.”

Dating back 60 million years, the Sandhill Crane is the oldest bird species on the planet. The group had the privilege of seeing a migration that has been occurring for eons, and the students had a chance to connect the dots from their classroom studies to the natural world.
 
William Moskoff is Hollender Professor Emeritus of Economics and Biology.