Rowe Sanctuary

Every spring, from about Valentine's Day to Tax Day, more than a million sandhill cranes gather in the central Platte valley to fuel up on their way north to nest. They spend the days in the fields and the nights standing in the river, on wide, open channels and bare sandbars where they can see anything coming. Rowe Sanctuary exists to keep that river open.

The money came from Lillian Annette Rowe, a psychologist with a doctorate who had served in the Army in the Second World War. In 1967 she left much of her estate to the National Audubon Society to found a bird sanctuary somewhere in the United States, and in 1974 Audubon bought land here. The sanctuary now protects about five miles of river channel. Altered flows and fewer scouring floods let plants take hold on the sandbars, and left alone they become dense, wooded islands within a few years. So each fall, before the cranes come back, Rowe and the Platte River Recovery Implementation Program disk chosen sandbars back to bare sand. Whooping cranes are part of the sanctuary's work too.

The Iain Nicolson Audubon Center, finished in January 2003, is named for the late husband of a volunteer and donor. About 30,000 people come in crane season, and the numbers usually peak in mid to late March. Guided viewing from blinds near the old roosts at dawn and dusk needs a reservation, and registration opens in January; the visitor center and two roadside viewing lots need none.