65 On the migration battlefront 



Melvin Ramsey and State Game Protector Arthur Jones had been 

 on the job; various towns on or near the Platte River in Nebraska, 

 from Ogallala east to Grand Island (a distance of 190 miles); rural 

 areas in North Dakota, especially in Oliver, Kidder, and Burke 

 Counties; many communities in southern Saskatchewan, with 

 Fred Bard in Regina as the hub; southeast Alberta, where the 

 species often appeared in late summer or early fall, and various 

 isolated posts northward toward Great Slave Lake. The town of 

 Meadow Lake, Saskatchewan, where sight records had recently 

 been reported and where we eventually stopped off during our 

 work in that province, became another center of interest, and an 

 important one. 



When I reached North Platte, at the fork of the North and 

 South Platte Rivers in Nebraska, a delegation of some twenty 

 men was waiting for me at the Hotel Pawnee. They were a wel- 

 coming committee from the 1,000-member Lincoln County 

 Sportsmen's Association, and were accompanied by Wilson Tout, 

 editor of a local weekly, as well as author of Lincoln County Birds 

 and a prominent member of the North Platte Bird Club. They 

 had come to offer the services of their organizations, and during 

 the five weeks I was in Nebraska their help was an invaluable 

 asset. Since the record indicates that through the years more 

 whoopers had been shot on the Platte River and elsewhere in 

 Nebraska than anywhere else, the concern for the future of the 

 species, as expressed by this outstanding group of sportsmen, was 

 highly encouraging. 



My chief purpose in stopping along the Platte was to check all 

 reports of whooping cranes. Theoretically, the line of migration 

 was thought to be almost a direct route from Aransas Refuge in 

 Texas northward through west central Oklahoma and Kansas to 

 a major stop somewhere on the Platte River, thence on into the 

 Dakotas, Saskatchewan, and so on. The big question was -where 

 on the Platte I would be nearest to the present line of flight. 

 Although North Platte lay close to the western edge of the "area 

 of probability," the center of which was just to the west of Lex- 

 ington, 60 miles farther east, I gambled that since recent records 

 were closer to North Platte, this was an indication of the present 



