A Guide to the Natural History of the Central Platte Valley of Nebraska

This book has been written in the hope that visitors to the Platte Valley may gain a greater appreciation for it through learning some of its animals and plants in addition to the Platte Valley\u27s star spring attraction, its sandhill cranes. Besides the cranes, we have a world-class migration of geese and ducks, a slightly later migration of shorebirds, including what is probably the buff-breasted sandpiper\u27s most important spring staging area between its South American wintering grounds and its arctic breeding grounds. Nebraska also has what may be the largest surviving population of greater prairie-chickens of any state, and an even larger population of sharp-tailed grouse. It is also perhaps the easternmost portion of the Great Plains where one can reasonably expect to see such classic grassland animals as prairie dogs, pronghorns, burrowing owls, prairie falcons, golden eagles and ferruginous hawks. Just to the north of the Platte Valley is the Sandhills region, a near-wilderness of 19,000 square miles with large populations of such classic grassland birds as long-billed curlews, upland sandpipers, homed larks, and a half-dozen species of grassland sparrows. And, just to the south of the Platte Valley is a unique Rainwater Basin, with dozens of spring meltwater ponds and marshes that seasonally support a large diversity of wetland species, Few other places in North America can provide to much appeal to birders and other naturalists. I hope you will enjoy the Platte Valley as much as I have done for nearly 50 years- Paul A. Johnsgard Mozilla Firefox users: There is a known bug in the Firefox PDF plug-in (which opens PDFs within the browser window) that will crash if a file exceeds its buffer size. It will tell you “The file is damaged and cannot be repaired” (which is not true). There are 3 remedies: 1. Right-click and download the PDF outside the browser (i.e., “Save link as ...”) 2. Change your Firefox settings to open PDFs with regular Adobe Reader (or Acrobat) instead of the plug-in version. This is reached under Tools \u3e Options \u3e Applications. PDF files will then open in a separate Adobe Reader (or Acrobat) window, not inside the browser window. 3. Download the file with Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, etc