93
Let’s hear the story of Nebraska, its communities, its number one industry Agriculture, and the people who make it happen. Sponsored by Nebraska's Law Firm® - Rembolt Ludtke.
93
Michael Forsberg--Internationally Acclaimed Photographer and Conservationist
Michael Forsberg is Nebraska. In this episode Mike discusses how he got into photography, The Great Migration of Sandhill Cranes soon to descend upon Nebraska, the Platte Basin Timelapse project and his latest book, Into Whooperland, which was recently reviewed by the Wall St. Journal.
Brad. It's not just a play, but a way of life. It's 93 county that are home to innovative individuals. Very community. Welcome to 93.
SPEAKER_00:Welcome to 93, the podcast, where we talk about Nebraska, its communities, its number one industry agriculture, and the people who make it happen. I'm Mark Falson, your host for today's episode, brought to you by Nebraska's law firm, Rembrandt Latin. We're on the eve of what's been called the Great Migration, when hundreds of thousands of sandhill cranes take respite along the Platte River in Nebraska as they head north to their Arctic and subarctic breeding ranges. It's truly a thing of beauty that most Nebraskans know about and probably have seen, but the reality is most of us, if not all of us, take it for granted. In today's episode, we're joined by world-renowned photographer and conservationist Michael Forsberg. His photographs have been featured in National Geographic, Audubon, The Nature Conservancy, and countless other publications. He is the author of multiple books, including On Ancient Wings, The Sandhill Cranes of North America, and the recently released Into Whooper Land, a collection of photographs in his journey with the whooping crane, which is North America's tallest bird and an endangered species. Also joining us is Tim Clare, a legendary partner at Rumbold Lucky, who specializes in estate planning and business law. Mike, Tim, thanks for joining us.
SPEAKER_01:Pleasure to be here, Mark. Nice to see you, Tim. Good to be seen, and I appreciate you taking time out of your day to come and visit with us about uh your tremendous career and and uh the things that you've done. Thanks.
SPEAKER_00:So, Mike, you're a Lincoln native. Give it give our listeners who maybe don't know anything about you, uh sort of your background story.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, born and raised uh in Lincoln, Nebraska, uh Lincoln East High Spartan through and through. You did need to mention that. Yes, yes, you did. Yes, he did. Even though our children went to Southeast, I still wore blue underpants. You know, I had to have something on that was blue when they played. Um alumni of the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, uh, as were my my parents. Uh my mom grew up in Kimball, Nebraska, um, preacher's kid. Um my dad grew up in Kearney and uh spent a lot of his formative years uh on farms south of the plat, where a lot of my relations on my dad's side still farm. When I uh left, I got a degree in geography at the University of Nebraska Lincoln. So I never took a photography class, writing class, speaking class, or business class in my life, which I probably should have looking back now. But um the nice thing about geography at the university was it gave me a perspective to look at the world and how we're connected to each other across the landscape. And that maybe was the best practice that I had uh to allow me to do the career that I've had today, with the camera in hand, traveling up and down the Great Plains. So I'm married. My wife Patty is from Utica, Nebraska. Uh, we've been married 32 years, I believe, now. I have two daughters, Elsa and Emmy. Um, Elsa is uh 27, Emmy 25. So um, yeah, if somebody would have told me when I was in high school that I'd have made a life in Nebraska and raised my family here, probably would have laughed them out of the room because I wanted to go spread my wings. Well, you kind of have. I have, but man, I'm so glad that it's been home. You know, this this is home to me and it always will be. So um, and I wouldn't have wanted to have done this work or lived my life any place else. When did you first pick up a camera? I first picked up a camera in college. I was working as a trip leader for the outdoor adventures program at the University of Nebraska, um, taking people on these wild trips into the western landscapes. And uh, you know, we did rock climbing and whitewater boating and bicycle touring and so forth, and come home with nothing to show. So my dad had a friend um who loaned me a camera. I stuck it in my backpack on a staff training trip, and uh fell in love um with the camera. And I think the thing about taking pictures was it allowed me to connect with the natural world in a more intimate way that I could that I couldn't otherwise. Even doing all those activities was cool, but that was something that that um I don't know, there's just something about it. And I always sucked at art growing up, but I always loved it. And this was the first time that I could put a camera up to my eye and and make something that I felt about the thing that I was doing or what I was seeing in front of me.
SPEAKER_00:So given when you started photography, I assume you know what a dark room is. I do, but I've never been in one. Oh, seriously? No. So I can still smell what a dark room smells like. So I did photography in high school for our newspaper and our yearbook. And the smell of the chemicals that you use to develop photographs back then still has stuck with me to this day.
SPEAKER_02:Aaron Powell Well, so I started, I learned on slide film, which is positive film. And slide film then you is not developed in a dark room. It's developed by a different process that that is is very refined, and and you would send the film off and then it would come back to you.
SPEAKER_00:So like Walgreens?
SPEAKER_02:Not Walgreens. But when you get it back, you'd turn on a light table and and you'd open up your your uh it's like opening a deck of cards. Right. And you'd start laying them out and looking at them with a with a little magnifying glass, uh it's called a loop. And when you would open, when you'd crack the seal on um those 36 frames that were in that little box, um, it was that smell that I still remember too. And then just to see the glow, you know, emanating from below, these tiny little jewels, um, you know, I'll I'll never forget that. So anybody that's grown up today with a camera in hand that's never experienced film or or or uh you know developing film in a dark room or shooting slides, um, it'd be nice to go back to that analog at least once and just uh have that sensory experience.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, it reminds me of the movie The Secret Life of Walter Middy. Uh so it's a Sean Penn plays as photojournalist, and uh he's a kind of kind of an odd cap that leads a great life. And so they're looking at the what you're describing to find the perfect picture that describes life, and they they pull one of those up. So I've got the visual in my head. One of my favorite films.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, it's great. But come on, Sean, take the picture of the snow leopard, for God's sakes.
SPEAKER_00:Tim, have you ever used a uh camera other than the one on your phone?
SPEAKER_01:No.
SPEAKER_00:It's all in my head. So the great migration of cranes through Nebraska is about to descend upon us. When was the first time you went out for it or saw it?
SPEAKER_02:It was over Easter in high school. My grandpa and grandma forestburg. Uh, we had we had traveled out to Carney uh to have Easter and uh you know, afternoon after the nap, uh grandpa said, let's go, let's go take a ride. And um so he took the pellet gun first and we went and shot Popcans, you know, right on the county, county road, set them up on fence posts on a farmer's land that we knew and did that. And then as the sun started to set, grandpa said, let's go, let's go park uh next to the river. And you know, grandpa's a really clean guy. He had this big long white, you know, Chrysler New Yorker with with red leather seats and all this stuff. I I never would have thought that he'd actually drive down this county road to go park next to the river, but we did. It's like, what are we doing here? And he said, Well, just wait. And pretty soon here comes these giant birds, you know, flying like like arrows um low across the the farm fields back to the river at sunset, and then they were just falling like autumn leaves. It almost it actually what it looked like to me was was you know flying monkeys and the wizard of oz. I mean, that's how bright they were, and that was how impressionable it was. And so that was the first time. And at that point, that these birds really I took notice, you know. I grew up here in Nebraska, but I didn't really get to know Nebraska and and all the beauty that is here until my until my later years, because I I was I always played outside. Um when we would take trips, we'd take trips into nature, but we'd drive 500 miles up to Colorado three times a year, we go to the Oregon coast, and um never really thought much about Nebraska until maybe that first experience. And then later in college working for outdoor adventures, taking people up to the Niagara River and into the sand hills and so forth, and and then later working as a photographer and writer for Nebraska Land magazine.
SPEAKER_00:So for those who haven't seen the Sand Hills Crane, can you describe for our listeners what it looks like and how majestic it is?
SPEAKER_02:Aaron Powell Yeah, they're they're uh three and a half to four feet tall, um, big gray birds that when you're driving down the interstate at 80 miles an hour, you may see them out in uh out in a cornfield and they may not look like much, but when you get close to them, um you know they are fifty shades of gray. And to understand that one of the they're one of the oldest living bird species on the planet. Um fossil record goes back with sand-hilled cranes about three million years. And cranes have been coming to Nebraska for about nine million years. Um fossil evidence up in Ashefall um fossil beds in northeastern Nebraska for that. Um they are long-lived, they live 20, 30 years in the wild. They don't reach sexual maturity till they're four or five. They only have two young a year. Umly one usually survives uh that first year. They learn everything from mom and dad. The young undergoes a voice change, just like we do. They're very human-like in their mannerisms, they wear their emotions on their sleeves, long legs, big wings. They're very much like us, and there's 15 crane species in the world. We have two of them here in North America. We have the sandal crane, which is the most populous of all, and the whooping crane, which is the rarest of all. But in every culture, in every place around the world where there are cranes, there's reverence for these birds. Um deep reverence that goes back thousands and thousands of years in their cultures and in their religions. So they're very powerful. Aaron Powell, Jr.
SPEAKER_00:So the whooping crane is endangered. What do they estimate its current population to be? Trevor Burrus, Jr.
SPEAKER_02:Current population is around 550.
SPEAKER_00:So that's actually is that down from what it was a few years ago, or is that slowly growing?
SPEAKER_02:Aaron Powell Well, there's it's a layered question, but back in the, you know, historically they believed there were tens of thousands of whooping cranes spread throughout a lot of North America. The wetland birds, sandhill cranes and and whooping cranes both rely on wetlands and grasslands to survive, healthy wetlands and grasslands to survive. But whooping cranes got down to less than 20 in the world. When we were going to war in World War II, there were less than 20 birds left in the world. And the reason that they knew that there were any at all is that they'd show up on the Texas Gulf Coast in one small little refuge called Ranzas National Wildlife Refuge, but they had no idea where they were coming from. You know, they just knew that they showed up there. Um years later, they found where they nested, which was 2,500 miles north in Wood Buffalo National Park, which is up above the 60th parallel almost in the Northwest Territories of Canada. Um from that time, when they identified where their nesting grounds were and how how how small in number there were, there was a campaign that started to try to bring these birds back. And it's a long, beautiful, complex story, but today these birds um are rising up. And we have about 550 in the in the wild, which is, if you think about it, it's not very much. If you're if you're in church on a Sunday and you look around in the you know congregation, you count, you got about 500 people maybe in that room, right? That's not very many birds. Um but they are slowly climbing, climbing out. They got a long ways to go. Um, but uh it's a it's a hopeful conservation story that's intimately tied uh to us and where we live.
SPEAKER_00:So, Tim, I'm gonna ask you, and the mic's gonna settle the debate. Is it whooping or whooping crane?
SPEAKER_01:Well, I've always understood it to be whooping crane, but uh I learned earlier today that it that it's yeah, let's ask let's ask the expert. Let's ask the expert.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, so if you're s if you're if you're Kansas or South, um I always do this show of hands when I talk about these birds. Um the majority of people say whooping crane. If you're Nebraska north, it's whooping crane.
SPEAKER_01:I'm gonna go I'm going with whooping. I'm going with whooping. Yeah. It's like Crick or Creek. Mike, I think I think one thing that's been fascinating about what you have done and and it's easy as a as a lay person to look at your books and say, oh, it's a picture of a bird. But why don't you describe for our audience the the depth and breadth and the what you have to do in terms of trying to get up close and personal pictures that you've you've obtained over the years, you know, the the blinds that you've created and and the the length of time that you sit in the blinds to get a a photo like these.
SPEAKER_02:Well when you know when I made a decision years ago to really focus on my big backyard and the Great Plains, um this is a hard place to photograph wildlife because uh everything evolved with great eyesight, runs fast, lives in holes in the ground, or is hunted. You know, so it's not like driving down the roads of Yellowstone and and there are the bears, or there's the wolf, or there's the you know, there's the deer. So um you have to almost take the take the approach of a of a hunter, really. You're using a lot of those things. You have to understand the animal, you have to understand the land, you have to understand yourself, you have to know how to dress, you have to be okay to fail, you have to be fine with going out and spending days, weeks, sometimes months on end over a course of years to try to get a photograph that you may or may not make. You also have to work with people. You know, where we live in the Great Plains, um you know, in Nebraska, you know, we're 97% or so private ownership. Most states in the Great Plains are the same way. You know, Texas is 98, Kansas is about the same, you know, you just run up and down. So you gotta work with people too. And having those relationships take time. You know, there's there's this old adage in photography that to make good pictures you have to have um access. But then after access, you have to have acceptance. And acceptance is based on trust. And trust takes a lot of time. So most of the work that I do and have done over the last 30 years or so is based on that, on that premise of acceptance and trust. Because usually people just don't let you on the land. Usually they're they're skeptical, leery of of pictures that you make and what you're gonna do with them. And and you know, and I've made mistakes, you know, in younger life trying to be learning that the hard way like everybody else does. But it takes an awful lot of effort to bring a picture uh to light that you feel proud of that says something. And um but you never see our failures unless if we show you, you know. Um and on the on the technical side of it, cameras is is is like any it's like playing a guitar or piano or uh swinging a golf club. It's you have to understand the nuts and bolts of how everything's work works and you have to practice, practice, practice, practice. Then after that, um if you practice enough and this becomes sort of muscle memory to you, then you can really create. You know, it's not just reading notes on a page and playing the chords, it's actually making music. And um and that's and that's hard. It's not it's not easy, and not everybody can do it.
SPEAKER_00:So can I assume you're gonna be spending some uh time on the Platte River in the coming weeks?
SPEAKER_02:Yes. Um in fact, uh today when I leave here, here in Lincoln, um I'm driving to Funk, Nebraska. Population 102 or 103, depending on who you ask. I think that's the home of Rhoda Claridge. Trevor Burrus, Jr. That it is, that's correct, yes. And it also is is uh I mentioned my dad earlier who passed a few years ago. Um most of his family on on most of that side of my dad's family still farm in the funk area, but they are uh they're having their first um uh uh whooping crane festival this year. They're calling it crepes and cranes. And it's gonna be in early April. It's gonna be at the community hall in Funk, which I think is just like the greatest thing I've ever participated in in my life. And I'm gonna go talk with uh the organizers there to look at the venue and figure out what we're gonna do there for those couple hours. Uh from there, I'll go to Audubon's Row Sanctuary and meet with their new director there and talk about a uh 50th anniversary event that they're gonna have at the end of the month in Kearney. And then I'm gonna uh finish at the at the crane trust um this evening where they're having uh an invitation of friends and and uh supporters and local landowners there to get together and and uh um have appetizers, a few drinks, and celebrate being together before the crane season starts and finish by going to blinds and watching these birds come back to the river at night. And then they're and there's not a lot of cranes here yet. We're just on the tip of migration, but the dam is about ready to burst. Right. All to Nebraska. Yeah, that's right. Where the crane trust is.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:So if if someone hasn't seen this before, do you have any recommended viewing spots or spots along the Platte River where they should go if it's their first time?
SPEAKER_02:Sure, yeah. I you know, I just mentioned uh both the Crane Trust and Audubon's Row Sanctuary. Audubon is closer to Carney, the Crane Trust is closer to Grand Island, but they're only about 20 miles from each other, and those both of those uh organizations do a great job of education and interpretation, um, science and research, and and you can you can pay to uh go spend time in the blinds with guided naturalists in the in the evening and the morning. You can also learn a lot about these birds during the day. But for a lot of people, um it's nice to just be in the open air. So I encourage folks to just go drive those those county roads south of the Platte and get an experience because these birds they sleep on the river at night, but then they leave and they go out into the fields for the rest of the day. And uh it's it's pure magic. I mean, Nebraskans should be really, really proud of what is here because the only reason that these birds are here is because that river is here. And the only reason that river functions the way that it does for these birds is because people are working really hard 365 days a year to keep it clean of vegetation, keep those sandbars out there and that nice braided river channel there, so these birds have sanctuary during the night. So it's one of the greatest shows on earth. And when I talk around the country about cranes, I'll have a lot of people that will say to me in other parts of the country, well, I've seen cranes here or there, or whatever, and I ask them if they've seen it in Nebraska, and they'll say no. Well, this is different. This is the rock concert. Yeah. And um, but you know, increasingly what's interesting is is over these last few decades, um Nebraska is not just thought of for football and agriculture and nice people and all of that. They are increasingly thought of about this, about this great pinch in the hourglass of the central flyway that is this this great gathering of of birds on the Platte, which also brings another great migration of people to the Platte. Every state in the country, every year. And depending on where we're at, thirty to forty different countries around the world, and that is remarkable.
SPEAKER_00:Any any opportunity to bring folks to Nebraska, tourists Tourist dollars. I mean, that the what a it's great that towns like Funk and others are embracing it and celebrating it.
SPEAKER_01:Yep. Yeah, Mike, we went we went hunting. You used to be with Nebraska Land magazine. Right. And we went hunting together. You didn't hunt, you took pictures. I used your limit while we hunted. That's right. Which was which was awesome. But then, you know, and so you sit in a in a goose blind or a duck blind, and and if you have never done that, you s you sit in the blind and you wait for the birds to fly in, and you can do it from from basically dawn to dusk. With the cranes, I want to go back to my question earlier. I think there people need to understand how the time that you set up your blind for the for the photographs that you took and the time that you had to sit in that blind, it was up it was in excess of 20 hours.
SPEAKER_02:Aaron Ross Powell So there was a uh early on at Nebraska Land, which was my first my first job as a photographer and writer, my editor sent me out to tell the story of Sandhill Crane's migration, but he said, I don't want any pictures from the river. I've seen a million of them. Show me where they go in the middle of the day. And where do they go in the middle of the day? Was that a starting point for you? That was the you know, the spark moment for cranes for me was with my grandparents in high school, but the moment that uh set the anchor for the rest of my life was was this assignment for Nebraska land. And what I noticed was, and then what I knew was that these birds go, they go into the cornfields and feed on waste grain left over from previous falls harvest first. That's that's where they get their carbs, that's sort of their spaghetti or their pizza. That's their fat. But then they need grasslands and wetlands too. And they spend half of their day in these grasslands and wetlands getting all the other nutrients and proteins that they need to be to finish their migration, which for some of them is still thousands of miles away, you know, pushing winter north. Um, and they also need them for proper eggshell development and such. And so they're they're digging around in in wetlands and grasslands to get their other proteins. And that's where I set up a blind. I I saw it, I saw a field where these birds were coming in, went and approached the farmer, knocked on the door, explained my predicament, told him I wanted to build a blind in the side of the side of his fence and uh leave it there for a week and and see if I could if I could photograph him. And I slid in and out of that blind every day, laying on my belly the whole time, uh, waiting for these birds to come in where I'd seen them the first day, and they didn't come for six days. Six days, you know, and I was scared to death I was gonna lose my job because I needed to do this. And finally, the you know, one of the last days that I actually had to do it, the birds came in, and they came in closer than um than I've I've ever been to cranes in my life to this day. And I've photographed them, I'm sure, more than anybody else, probably on the on the continent at this point. And uh but it was a magical experience for those for those couple days, um, being so intimate with these birds that knew that there was something there, but they accepted whatever that was, and then you don't break that trust. And so those pictures came out into in Nebraska Land in I don't know when it was, it was like 1996, maybe 95, 96, and uh a gentleman named Paul Gruco, um, who's passed away now from Minnesota, wrote a beautiful essay called What Cranes Say. And and that really that really launched um me into my first book um on ancient wings, Sandy Cranes in North America, which which I did from 1999 to 2004. And then um, you know, after that, uh Nebraska Public Television made a documentary called Crane Song, which 20-some years later they still play today, so I get to see myself without the much younger version of that.
SPEAKER_01:But I think I think you know you talked earlier about trust of the farmer or the rancher or the landowner. But I think there's also trust among the birds. Absolutely.
SPEAKER_02:You know, you have to uh you build trust. There there are there are things that go beyond the reach of words when you're working close with wildlife, where they're um you never want to photograph uh these birds and disrupt their behavior, or any wildlife for that matter. Um it's beautiful if um if you know that they trust you and and you trust them, and you're just sitting there flying the wall watching them and what they do. Um that for me that that gets into um a real depth of of spirituality. For me, it's a connection with God. For me, it's it's it's this thing that's this this intangible thing that just feels like you're floating, you know, and and every once in a while you can bring that forward in a photograph and hopefully people will feel that that you felt.
SPEAKER_01:So what so what I think is so amazing about your career is you had that spark moment with your grandfather, you had the moment where you N with Nebraska land where they want to see the the the birds up close, basically. But then you've taken it a step further in Wooper. And now you've you have always been a leader, always been a leader. And and and uh you know you're quarterback of the of the football team in high school. And so your leadership took you to digging deeper from what your boss said at Nebraska land to now you you you talk a little bit about what you did in in not only just creating your blind in to get up close to the birds, but now where do they go? And in the in the the whooper land book, you talk about flying the plane all the way down south as well as up north too.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, you know, it's it it's all about stories. Uh stories um are what people really relate to. And um, you know, if there's one thing that's inherently human is we tell stories, and and I've found that um telling stories where you take people on a journey is what has the most impact. So um, you know, with with the Sand Hill Crane book years ago, I went to 13 different places around the continent five years. When I wrote the book, it was a journey that I took you along with me. Um I did a book on the Great Plains in North America, it took five years. Traveled 100,000 miles um up and down the heart of the Great Plains, you know, which is a million square miles, you know, and 1,500 miles long, again, taking people with. The the Wooperland book, um, one of the things we did is is traveled by with a small plane in a small plane, Cessna 172, 1957, vintage aircraft, and traveled with these birds on migration from the Texas Gulf Coast to Wood Buffalo National Park. Um, you know, 3,000 miles, took us 18 days. And we were traveling the same uh pathway that these birds were, and experiencing some of the same things these birds were. Can we fly today? Where are we gonna eat? Where are we gonna get fuel? Where are we gonna sleep? You know, all you know, what's the weather gonna be like? We're gonna have to dodge this this tornado here, we're gonna have to dodge this thunderstorm, we've got to move around this this airbase, we we have blizzards that we have to negotiate. You know, the only thing that the birds didn't have to negotiate was an international border, you know. So um which they don't pay any attention to. So um and you know, and and one thing we haven't talked about is is uh the Platte Basin Time Lapse Project, which is a collaboration with the uh with the University of Nebraska Lincoln, and and as part of that project.
SPEAKER_01:She did. We've wasn't our I think our firm was one of the sponsors for you.
SPEAKER_02:They yeah. I mean uh your firm has uh always been my um my legal counsel since the very beginning, clear back and whenever that was, Tim, you know. Umy moons ago. Um but you know the Platte Basin Time Lapse project is about asking the basic questions where do your water come from? And we use the Platte River as the stage. One of the ways to tell that story is to follow a drop of water from the very furthest western point that it comes from all the way to where it dumps into the Missouri South Omaha. So a former student of mine and I, Pete Steagan, um, we traveled that journey. We found the very furthest west water starts, which is the southern end of the Wind River Range in Wyoming, which is a long ways west. And we biked, backpacked, and canoeed all the way. Took us 55 days. Um, 1350 days. Oh, uh we'd take a dip in the river once in a while. But you know, it's taking that journey, which which we're all on a journey, you know, and and and uh going only as fast as as as your body will take you, or as far as fast or as swift as the river will flow is a really beautiful thing. And um so I think that's you know, we we try to relate to people on stories. And as a photographer, I I never knew when I started this two things. I learned two things as a photographer early on, is is one is um you have to let people in a little bit. You can't just, you know, put a nice picture up on a wall or in a magazine and and have people appreciate it. That's fine. But what but they want to know a little bit more about the photograph, about the experience, and that gets into the the telling telling stories.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. So well, I think that's what clearly separates your work from from other people's work, uh is that yes, you've got pictures. There's probably other people that that are uh photographers that have pictures of cranes and that type of thing. But but the stories and how you the depth and breadth and and time that you took to get you know almost intimate with with your with your topic, be it the river, be it the the crane, the flight pattern, everything. It's it's really truly remarkable. It's been a privilege to work with you on your journey. Thank you.
SPEAKER_00:So last month, Wall Street Journal did a review of your latest book, Into Whooper Land. It uh mentions the 5,000 miles that you traveled over four years uh following the whooping crane from uh coastal Texas to the Northwest Territories in Canada, mentioned the 100,000 images you produced, the 50 hours of video. But here's what I want to ask you about mentions that you had 10 coffee-stained journals that you ended up with. Tell me about your journaling. Uh journaling is a lost art that I think is coming back a little bit. How do you use journaling as it relates to your art and your craft?
SPEAKER_02:I use it to remember. And I I also use it never to forget, if that makes if that makes any sense. And and this into Wooperland book, people expected it to be another coffee table picture book, you know, sort of big and lavish and sitting on a table. I made it as a journal. Um the pictures in there are beautifully reproduced. We we printed it in the United States in a great printhouse out of Pennsylvania, but um it's the journal uh feel that I wanted because um that's that's sort of the raw uh emotions that you're putting down on the page that you see that also become locked in history then at that point. And so these journals um, you know, you just sort of pour yourself out into them, and then if you're brave enough, you open them up and you let people in. So if you look through this book, there's a lot of excerpts from the journal in there. And and we made this book as something that you can take with you, um, not something that just sits somewhere and and it is a lost art. Um my problem is I can hardly read my writing anymore. Which did you consider medical school at some point? No, I I I I didn't for many reasons, including that. But y you know, it's yeah, I I I think that again, what people want today is at least in my mind, is they want authenticity. Just be honest. You know, be you. That's what I tell students at the university, that's what I tell my young team with plat base and time lapses, is just be you. Every single voice matters. Your voice matters just as much as mine does. Um your experience is different than mine, your perspective is different, your philosophies, your religion, your political views, all that stuff may be different, but it's uniquely you. And just be you. That's what we need to hear today. And and journaling is is a is a great doorway into that, is the same as as as photography is or or or any other creative endeavor. We're all creative, you know, in some way. You you both have to be creative in the jobs that you have, you know, in the careers that you have. You know, it's not just nuts and bolts stuff.
SPEAKER_00:Aaron Ross Powell So do you have a favorite photograph? If you said at this point in your career, and I know you've got a little lot of root road ahead of you, if you had to say this is my best shot to date, do you have that?
SPEAKER_02:I no, I you know, I I don't. I I get asked that a lot. And you know, I I know that there's a couple photographs that that for for other people stand out. Um there's a photograph that I made actually from the blind in the on the edge of the farmer's field that we call Joy, um, which is a sand hill crane, you know, leaping into the air with its wings back that has become um a um kind of one of your almost your trademark picture. Yeah, yeah. It's it's it's you know, our our Tim and I's close friend Cliff Hollistel um made it into a sculpture. Um it's become the icon for our business. Um I've had many people show me the tattoos of that bird and various at parts of their body over the years. Wow, that's interesting. Which is very interesting, yeah. Um then there's another picture of an owl, a little burrowing owl that's about the size of a popcorn that lives in the pray dog towns in the in the western plains that is just looking at you with its wings spread out. And uh, you know, that that that fierce look of that little owl is shows us that wildness is still alive here in the Great Plains in North America and is resilient. And um, but uh yeah, I I think every every photograph that that you get to see has a has a story and some sort of emotive quality behind it. So I think maybe my favorite one is the one that might come next.
SPEAKER_00:So the Sand Hills Crane obviously makes reference to the Sand Hills region of Nebraska. You also have uh some really nice shots, some great stuff you've done out there. Again, describe for our listeners who have never been to the Nebraska Sand Hills region what it looks like and its value and importance.
SPEAKER_02:The Nebraska Sand Hills is probably my favorite place on earth. And it's a place that you can stand on top of a prairie hilltop on a summer's day and spend 360 degrees and not see another soul. And it's just you and the grass and the wind. It's it's like this this rolling sea of grass. You know, it looks just like standing on the edge of the coast, looking out over the ocean, and and to understand that, you know, this I mean, it's it's almost 20,000 square miles, so it takes up about a quarter of our state. And underneath it is is you know the holy grail of the of the plains, which is the Ogallala aquifer, which is, you know, stretches over seven parts of seven states, but it's the deepest and most abundant in the sand hills. And the reason that the grass is still in grass is because we have these remarkable stewards of the land, these ranchers that are all each of them, each of them has their own approach. But what they know that they have to do is they can't overgraze. Um, they have to be tender stewards to these landscapes. And because they're able to make a life on the land, everything else is able to be there still too today. Because most of the Great Plains in North America is one of the most transformed landscapes in the world today. The sand hills in Nebraska, you can feel a deep sense of wildness and spirit that um you can feel nowhere else. It's it's it's almost timeless. And and you're right. I I can talk about the Nebraska Sand Hills to people, and most people that I talk to have no idea where they are. They maybe have heard of them. And and these are folks that that were born and raised here. Right. And it's not their fault. It's just we are living in an increasingly urbanized world. We don't get out as much as we used to. And uh it is it is one of the the greatest natural treasures that we have on this continent. And um, you know, and and and it's another thing that Nebraskans um should be very proud of and uh and and and and never let go of.
SPEAKER_01:Mike, you've done such amazing work from uh a company starting, you know, the with Nebraska land and then uh taking photographs out of our duck blind, um, taking photographs of the cranes, um traveling uh from the Texas Gulf Coast up well into Canada. Some of your work has been combined with our our good friend Cliff Hollistel, who is an amazing uh world champion duck carver, uh, and your work has been you've done joint projects with him. Um you've had projects that that that you've been involved with uh you know out of the children's zoo with the with the crane exhibit out there. Um your stamp, uh Nebraska adopted, I believe, your stamp from the 150th anniversary. Yeah, two two stamps, actually.
SPEAKER_02:We had a uh international postage stamp, uh, which was of Nine Mile Prairie. That was in two maybe 2001 or so. I forgot about that. And then um and then the for the Nebraska Susquea Centennial. Say that quickly. Nope. Um in 2017, a uh a photograph of Sandhill Cranes flying over the Platte River was the uh was the stamp, uh the image selected for the stamp that year. Trevor Burrus, Jr. What's been your favorite project? Uh yeah, you know, I think I think the favorite project of all is the project that that um my buddy Mike Farrell and I started uh in uh partnership at the university in 2011. And that's the Platte Basin Time Lapse Project because um we're in our 14th year now. And neither Mike nor I had any idea that it would have the legs that it has had or the support that it has had, because what we do in that project besides um telling stories and and and so forth about our watershed and about our river that's our lifeblood in our state and how it connects to Colorado and Wyoming and other places, is that we're trying to grow the next generation of conservation storytellers. So, you know, we we have interns, we teach classes, uh, we take people on trips. Uh a couple of uh two weeks from now, um we're doing a uh a trip to the Platte River and then up to the sand hills in Nebraska. We we call it the cranes and chickens. So we take a group of students, we stay at the crane truss for a couple days, um, see the great migration, but also huge. From scientists and landowners and others about their lives on the Platte. And then we go to the Nature Conservancy, visit Chris Helzer there near Wood River, and hear about what they're doing at the Platte River Prairies. And then we go up to the Schweitzer Ranch in the eastern sand hills, and we spend a couple days and nights watching prairie chickens and sharp-tailed grouse dance in the morning and then learning about how the Schweitzers ranch, how they run their operation there, and what they think about the land today and uh what it means to them. And so, you know, these kinds of the that project has become a learning laboratory and a launch pad to grow this next generation of kids that know how to communicate science and story, um, where you're building community around whatever it is. It can be a place like the sand hills, it can be a watershed like the Platte. Um but I think we've created a template that can be lifted up and applied just about anywhere in the country, anywhere, anywhere in the world. It's a way that you look at things and it's a way of coming together. It's not finding the things that divide you, it's finding the things that unify you. And and we all um, you know, need to work together in community to do that, to take care of this land for a long time to come. And uh so I've I'm I'm the most when when somebody asks me, I get asked a lot formally sometimes to you know quantify or measure the outcomes that you've had in this project to justify you know your budget or whatever that is. And you know, I I can do that in in some sense, but to me it's not the numbers. I just I disappointed all the young people that have been attached to this project. You know, um some that have have come and launched into other careers and some that turned around and said, you know what, we've we've been interns in this project. Um we just got our degree, we're gonna go get master's degrees here at the University of Nebraska, and then we want to come and stay and be here in this state. And there is no better example of what this state wants um than what this project does. You know, and these kids that work for me, they're not kids anymore, and they're they're fifty times more talented than I ever was at this age, um, are rock stars um that want to be here um and um and they each have something very important to say, and they're building their own communities now. And I'm really, really proud of that. But the only way we do that is we do it together. So we've had a lot of support over the years from university to private philanthropy to grants and so forth, and I hope we can keep it going as long as we can.
SPEAKER_00:So, Mike, something we ask all of our guests, and you just get one word. What's one word that describes this place where you grew up and where you live, and which you have the opportunity each and every year, you and hopefully thousands of others to go watch the cranes come in. What's your one word for Nebraska?
SPEAKER_02:Resilient.
SPEAKER_00:Can you explain? We're all still here. Well said. Mike, it's an honor and a pleasure. Thank you for taking time out of your busy schedule to share your uh experiences and insight with us. If folks want to find out more about you, uh your new book, and some of your other works, where should they go? You can go visit michaelforceburg.com.
SPEAKER_02:Um, you can also visit uh Platbase and Timelapse. Um, and we do a podcast called Whooping Crane Chronicles. So those are the three little tags there. Awesome.
unknown:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:If you enjoyed this episode, consider subscribing on Apple, Spotify, or whatever your favorite podcast app is. If you know someone who's going to go crane watching in the coming weeks, or someone who probably should, feel free to share it with them as well. Keep listening as we release additional episodes on Nebraska. It's great communities. Nebraska's number one industry, agriculture, and the folks who make it happen.
SPEAKER_03:Thanks. This has been 93, the podcast, sponsored by Nebraska's law firm, Rembolt Ludkey.
