Click HERE for a full schedule of Crane Watch Festival events and activities.
Even with one event already cancelled, the brand new Crane Watch Festival is kicking off in Kearney on Friday.
It's 10 days of events and activities, all about cranes.
"The Kearney and the Gibbon and the Minden areas came together and really wanted to come up with a fun and a creative and an educational way to celebrate all things crane related," Crane Watch Festival committee chair Brandon Benitz says.
The festival is meant to attract not only tourists who are in town viewing the crane migration throughout the month of March, but locals as well.
"People come from all over to see the cranes, but not as many people in the community actually come out for that," Crane Watch Festival intern Taylor Rath says.
Organizers say a migration that regularly attracts more than 700,000 cranes and 30,000 people from across the country and world deserves a celebration like this one.
"We've had a lot of people say, finally somebody should have started a festival, or something should have been going on," Rath says.
But the first annual festival is already facing its first hiccup, before events even begin.
Benitz says the festival's parade, scheduled for Sunday, has been cancelled because organizers couldn't garner enough participation.
"We wanted it to be first class, in terms of our schedule and we wanted it to be top notch and we didn't feel we could meet that standard or live up to that standard this year," Benitz says.
But despite that cancellation, organizers say they're still confident the festival will be a success this year and many years to come.
"We fully expect there to be crane festivals going on for the next many, many years," Benitz says.
