A prairie welcoming party for the sandhill cranes

KEARNEY, Neb. — They looked like peppercorns ground into the sky and then like ribbons of black silk or a stain spreading overhead.

Each spring, for close to 1 million years, hundreds of thousands of sandhill cranes have converged on the Platte River Valley in central Nebraska. For roughly a month, the birds rest and refuel on their annual path from the southern United States and Mexico, where they winter, to the Arctic regions of Canada, Alaska and Siberia, where they breed. Jane Goodall, who tries to make the trip every year to witness the phenomenon, has called it “without a doubt one of the most spectacular events in the natural world.”

The sandhill crane spring migration dates vary due to temperatures, anytime from late February through mid-April. The Nebraska Game & Parks Commission says numbers peak about mid to late March.

One weekend in April of this year, Sheila Berger, a 65-year-old artist and former fashion model whose own migratory path took her from St. Louis to New York City, assembled a flock of far-flung friends to witness the extravaganza alongside her.

“This viewing rivals any safari you would have in Africa,” said Berger, whose hat was festooned with a golden frond of grain. “I’ve seen the gorillas in Rwanda, the elephants in Kenya, the lions and wildebeest in Tanzania. This is as good.”

Some spectators, like Berger’s husband, lawyer-turned-writer Michael Rips, with whom she has lived in the Chelsea Hotel since 1994, were originally from Nebraska themselves but had long ago flown the coop. The congregation included Grammy-winning singer Rosanne Cash; married authors Kurt Andersen and Anne Kreamer; Thomas and Alice Tisch, a MoMA trustee; and artist and garden designer Dana Westring and his partner, Trevor Potter, founding director of the Campaign Legal Center.

Martha Stewart had been invited along as well, but business obligations forced her to bow out of the festivities last minute. She was disappointed. “QVC can wait, but the cranes can’t,” she lamented later. “But that’s life.” As a consolation, Stewart made immediate plans to see next year’s migration. “The ‘do not disturb’ is already on my calendar,” she said.

The prairie party, such as it was, began in Omaha, with a tour of the Joslyn Art Museum and a visit to the studio of sculptor Jun Kaneko, whose large-scale ceramics take up to a month to fire in custom-built kilns. The next day, everyone drove the 2½ hours due west to the small city of Kearney, where Berger was to accessorize a public sculpture she had installed last spring at the Yanney Heritage Park, an 80-acre cornfield turned public park established in 1998 by Michael Yanney, a local investment banker.

When Yanney learned of Berger’s work a few years ago — she had recently installed a massive, mirrored bird sculpture on Governors Island in New York City — he commissioned her to make a meadowlark, Nebraska’s state bird, for the park.

“She sent me a drawing,” Yanney recalled. “I just said: ‘How big are you going make it? Because whatever size you see it as, it isn’t going be big enough. Make it big!’ And she did, and it’s simply gorgeous.”

Designed in New York City, fabricated in stainless steel in China and colored with pigments sometimes used in highly specialized car finishes, Berger’s meadowlark, which is nearly 8 feet tall, was installed during last year’s crane migration. It was then that Berger realized her rendition of the state bird should somehow interact with the migrating cranes. She liked how the cranes were, as she put it, “ugly and beautiful at the same time,” and how “they all had this red heart right in the center of their faces.” Inspired, she fashioned a small mask, like something a superhero might wear, also in stainless steel, and proposed that each year, the meadowlark could wear it for the length of the migration — the local bird and the visiting becoming one, at least for a few weeks.

And so on a gray Sunday, approximately 60 people gathered at Yanney Heritage Park. Berger was introduced by Mayor Jonathan Nikkila of Kearney inside the park’s pavilion, which was hung with elaborate colorful chandeliers by glass artist Dale Chihuly.

Berger described her sculpture as playful and childlike, and quoted Nebraska poet Ted Kooser, who had written of “Driving along / with your hand out squeezing the air, / a meadowlark waiting on every post.”

Berger smiled. “What,” she asked, “is this meadowlark waiting for?” She smiled again. “This meadowlark is waiting for today! To wear its mask and to welcome not only the cranes, but you, too.” She thanked everyone for coming and for joining her in “this crazy thing of putting a mask on a bird!” Her 26-year-old daughter, Nicolaia Rips, a memoirist and editor at ID magazine, stood up to embrace her.

Outside, a layered score of howling wind and distant I-80 traffic was occasionally pierced by the cry of a crane. The crowd beamed on as Berger, with the help of Eric Hellriegel, the director of parks for the city of Kearney, affixed the mask to the sculpture with an Allen wrench.

After the sculpture park ceremony, as dusk fell, the group of 16 friends convened at the Iain Nicolson Audubon Center at Rowe Sanctuary, which had celebrated its 50th anniversary the day before. Established in 1974 with the purchase of 782 acres funded by a New Jersey schoolteacher, Rowe is now almost seven times its original size and includes a river channel, meadows and agricultural land. After a brief informational video and the distribution of binoculars, everyone set off single file for the bird blind. With its minimal lines and silvered wood exterior, the structure resembled a Marcel Breuer building by way of Fire Island.

By 7:35 p.m., the sky, like the water, was a dark gray. A few dark cranes could be seen way up high. The strange, distant noises of coyotes could be heard echoing.

By 8 p.m., cranes were accruing from all directions, darkening the sky like ink blots, each one landing in the shallow water in what looked like slow motion. The low light made the scene resemble a black-and-white photograph. The previous week, 736,000 cranes had been counted — the most ever recorded. This evening, it felt as if there must have been at least as many.

“It’s so meditative,” whispered Cash, whom Berger had met over 20 years ago through a mutual friend, actress Mary Kay Place (“The Big Chill”). “It looks like an etching.” Cash’s breath was visible in the dark. “If somebody else had said to me, ‘Hey, come to Nebraska to see some cranes — it’s pretty hard to get to and it’s going to be freezing cold,’ I’d say, ‘Nah.’ But because it was Sheila, I didn’t think twice, and then of course it turns out to be so much better than you ever dreamed of.”

Sandhill cranes do migrate through Rowe Sanctuary in fall starting in late September through early November, but unlike in spring they rarely stay for an extended period, usually just overnight.