Crane Meadows Wildlife Refuge
TODAY KATHY AND I TOOK A LITTLE ‘Get Out Of The House’ trip to nearby Crane Meadows Wildlife Refuge by the Platte River.
We found a proud old red oak, gnarled, twisted, and broken, but still clutching to life with one limb, that limb still holding its russet leaves until spring. We found a blue stream still flowing across the prairie, despite all the changes of the past two centuries, and a grove of burr oaks—the prairie oak of the ‘oak openings’—adapted to prairie life by their armored bark which withstands the occasional prairie fire. We saw a great, leaning cottonwood and watched a soaring eagle. And we listened to the wind through the dry grass.
It was a quiet afternoon, and we observed less wildlife than in our own woods, where two foxes and four deer and all our usual congregation of birds stopped by for morning visits. But it felt good to get out of the house and walk under a blue, prairie sky by a blue stream, and listen to the wind.
