Groups or Individuals Agri/Eco Tours

The best vacations are those for which you have no expectations. Such was the case for our time spent with Bill Burdett. We are diletante birders, but when a more accomplished birder was “surprised” that we had never seen the crane migration in Nebraska we decided to go. It seemed like Grand Island would be a good place for “base camp” so we contacted Dana in the Grand Island Tourism Office who offered several suggestions including the Crane Trust. At the end of her email she offered one additional “tidbit”. She suggested we contact Bill Burdett to supplement our crane viewing. It was excellent advice. Although Bill is a veterinarian by profession he is incredibly knowledgeable about all things Nebraska and the way of life on the prairie. He is a rancher, a naturalist a geologist and historian. We spent more or less 3 days with Bill. We all (6 of us) rode in the same vehicle wherever we went and Bill provided an interesting and informative narrative throughout our travels. Yes, we saw the cranes many times. On our own we did an evening blind tour on the Platt River at Crane Trust. There were tens of thousands of Sandhill cranes and also Whooping cranes! With Bill we also saw Sandhills at dawn on the Platt, during the day in the corn fields and in flight at the Audubon Rowe Sanctuary in Gibbon (also worth a visit). One of our crew wanted to see the prairie chickens “dance” and Bill arranged a visit to the “Prairie Winds Birding Tours” ranch in Odessa, which has an ancient and amazing lek where we watched more than 20 male prairie chickens “dance”. It’s an early and chilly morning visit but another must see if you like birding. But birds are not the half of it when it comes to Bill’s “value added”. He arranged a “private lecture” with Josh a biologist at the Crane Trust who gave us the backstory on how hard this organization works to support the cranes. Bill taught us about the Ogallala aquifer that undergirds the entire Nebraska economy and the ubiquitous pivots that depend on it. We visited monuments and museums and the remnants of the Mormon Wagon Trail from the mid 1800s, we spent incredibly interesting and informative visits at a dairy farm, at the organic Strait Arrow Bison Ranch and at a very ecologically conscious organic cattle farm at the edge of the Sand Hills. We learned how these family-owned but very large farms take seriously their role as stewards of the land, how sophisticated they are in their farming practices and how close to the financial margin they operate. We stopped for lunch in small towns like Broken Bow that we would have never otherwise visited.