Every spring the cranes get the Platte's attention. By the time they leave, two smaller birds are on their way north to the same river, and their story runs the other way: birds of the open river that now raise their young almost entirely in holes people dug for other reasons.
The piping plover is a sand-colored shorebird about seven inches long, with one dark band across its breast. The interior least tern is a small black-capped tern that dives for fish. Both nest on bare or nearly bare sand, the plover laying four eggs in a shallow scrape lined with pebbles. On the Platte that meant the high, bare sandbars a braided river builds and scours. Dams, reservoirs and diversions changed the rivers of the plains, and on the Platte the sandbars declined from the early 1900s. The tern was listed as endangered in 1985, when fewer than 2,000 were left, and the northern Great Plains plovers were listed as threatened in January 1986.
Off the river
What the river stopped providing, the gravel business supplied without meaning to. Sand and gravel are dredged from pits all along the valley, and the spoil piles beside the ponds are bare sand next to water, which is all these birds ask for. From 1988 to 1991 John Sidle and E. M. Kirsch surveyed more than two hundred pits on the Platte and Loup. On the central Platte, where good sandbars were scarcest, birds nested at least once at 81 percent of the suitable pits, and in some years 94 percent of the birds there nested on pits rather than the river.
The trend did not reverse. The Platte River Recovery Implementation Program, run by Nebraska, Colorado, Wyoming and the Interior Department, now monitors 18 off-channel sites between Lexington and Chapman, sand and gravel mines working and retired and sites the program built itself, and keeps them bare with herbicide, fences and predator trapping. In 2024 its biologists counted 74 plover nests and 221 tern nests on them, more plover nests than they had ever recorded. They found none on the river. The last tern nest on an island in the channel was in 2016. The birds still fish the river, and the wide, open reach between the Minden and Gibbon bridges, on Rowe Sanctuary's land, is one of their regular feeding grounds.
The reservoir
The other refuge is a reservoir. Kingsley Dam closed on the North Platte in 1941 to store water for irrigation, and when Lake McConaughy drops it exposes long beaches of sand. In low-water years the plovers there can number in the low hundreds; when the lake is high, perhaps a dozen or two. The same beaches draw more than a million visitors a year, most of them in the May to August nesting season, and on a holiday weekend more than 70,000 people may be at the lake at once, many near fenced nests.
In 2021 the interior least tern came off the endangered list at about 18,000 birds. On the central Platte, part of that recovery was built on sand piles nobody meant for it.