Defenders Magazine

On the Wing Again

Once grounded, whooping cranes are taking off in the East

By Bill Updike

© Arthur Morris/birdasart.com

The scene seems straight out of a 1950s B-movie—a character stumbling across eerie tidal wetlands while wearing a sloppily stitched white costume with a reflective eye panel and an appendage jutting awkwardly into the air. Picture a bad actor dressed up like a crafty Martian bent on taking over our world.

But in this case, the costume is worn by a biologist trying to help one of our planet’s rarest residents—the whooping crane. A group of 19 of the endangered birds is roosting here at Chassahowitzka National Wildlife Refuge on Florida’s Gulf Coast, and Lara Fondow is dressed up as an ersatz crane in order to feed and keep an eye on these young birds. “They have an awareness that we are not birds, but they treat us as surrogate parents,” says Fondow, a biologist with the International Crane Foundation, a Wisconsin-based nonprofit group. Surrogate parents, perhaps—but when compared to the real 5-foot tall animal with its delicate white feathers and bright red-capped head, extremely ugly-looking costumed parents.

Fondow is one of a large team of conservationists in Florida, Wisconsin, Maryland and Canada that is helping to re-establish a migratory population of “whoopers” east of the Mississippi. This team breeds, feeds and protects the young birds, and then—with the help of ultralight aircraft—teaches them how to travel between their summer home at a Wisconsin wildlife refuge and their winter home at Chassahowitzka. Although it might look and sound like Hollywood fiction, it’s a true story. In fact, according to John French, a biologist with the U.S. Geological Survey, it’s a “textbook case of a species coming back from the brink.”

Few species have been closer to the cliff of extinction than whooping cranes. Named for their throaty, “whooping” call, an estimated 1,400 of these birds were found throughout North America in the middle of the 19th century. But by 1942, due largely to hunting and habitat loss from farming and development, only 15 were left, and the whoopers had entirely disappeared east of the Mississippi. The birds rely on wetlands (see sidebar), which, unfortunately for them, have been drained, filled and gobbled up from the time of the early settlers to today’s developers.

Because they were so rare, one of the challenges for initial efforts to restore the cranes was finding them. In 1946, researchers began looking in Canada for the summer nesting grounds of the remaining 15 birds that still traveled along the western migratory flyway. Eight years later, in 1954, they discovered the site in Alberta’s Wood Buffalo National Park. Following protections of their migratory stopovers and the wintering grounds at Aransas National Wildlife Refuge in southern Texas, and through the pioneering work of early researchers, the population of cranes increased, but remained dangerously low.

Those studying the birds realized in the mid-1960s that they were playing a dangerous game of brinkmanship—with only one group of birds, a catastrophic event, like a hurricane or forest fire, could wipe out the species forever. Beginning in 1967, when the whoopers were first listed as endangered under a law that preceded the current Endangered Species Act, biologists from the United States and Canada collected excess eggs from the western flock to establish captive populations. (Whooping cranes lay two eggs at a time, but usually only one survives.)

These initial efforts helped put a halt to the slide towards extinction. And ultimately, in 1975, the captive-breeding program succeeded to the point where whoopers raised at the U.S. Geological Survey’s Patuxent Wildlife Research Center in Maryland began producing eggs of their own.

Saving the birds from extinction was an important accomplishment. But many observers were skeptical that these captive-raised whoopers could ever be returned to the wild, and were even more doubtful that a migratory group would survive in the East. “When I first came to Patuxent all we were thinking about was how many eggs we [could] make,” says Kathy O’Malley, a biological technician at Patuxent. “No one thought that we could raise them to send into the wild.” But they are doing just that, and successfully.

The recipe for success includes a number of ingredients: attending carefully to egg incubating and chick rearing, getting the birds to follow humans posing as cranes, training the cranes to fly with ultralight aircraft, and sprinkling in some luck.

From the time of incubation at Patuxent, the whoopers hear recordings of ultralights to get them used to the sound. After hatching, the birds are trained to follow a machine that researchers call “the trike”—a grounded version of an ultralight that was donated by Defenders of Wildlife to aid in the reintroduction efforts. After six to ten weeks, but before they can fly, the cranes are sent off to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Necedah National Wildlife Refuge—43,656 acres of marshes and ponds in central Wisconsin, a state that historically was one of the whoopers’ summer homes.

At Necedah, the birds are trained in a unique regime pioneered by William Lishman, a Canadian ultralight pilot. Lishman first realized that ultralights travel at the same speed as migrating birds when he found himself flying in the middle of a flock of ducks one day. “It was such a great experience, I just had to do it again,” he says. Ultimately, Lishman and partner Joe Duff started the group Operation Migration, and together led the world’s first aircraft-guided migration of 18 geese from Ontario to Virginia—inspiring the film “Fly Away Home.”

After hearing of Operation Migration’s work with migrating Canada geese, the group was contacted by George Archibald from the International Crane Foundation, who asked if they would be interested in working with whoopers. Through efforts of the foundation, Operation Migration and the folks at Necedah, the initial work of training geese to imprint on and fly with ultralights was translated for the whoopers. Continuing the work begun at Patuxent with the “trike,” the cranes were taught to follow an ultralight up and down runways at the wildlife refuge. Eventually, the ultralight lifted in the air, and the birds followed behind. They trained with brief flights around the refuge for weeks before the big trip south.

Dressed in crane costumes, Operation Migration’s Duff and two other pilots led the first flock of eight captive-raised cranes on a 1,218-mile route from Necedah to Chassahowitzka in October 2001. The trip was far from smooth. One stormy, windy night, a group of handlers went to inspect the birds’ overnight pen site and found it toppled with no cranes in sight. Duff and his team searched for hours in the stormy weather, and finally found seven of the cranes. Sadly, the eighth had flown into a power line and perished during the night. “Any 1,200-plus-mile migration is going to be challenging—with the bad weather and mountains, and fog so thick that you can’t see your hand,” says Duff.

Their arduous efforts finally paid off when seven of the birds and the pilots arrived in Chassahowitzka in early December, 48 days after the initial take-off. The cranes spent more than four months in balmy Florida before returning to Wisconsin on their own in April 2002. Although scientists do not fully understand it, they believe the whoopers’ ability to return without guidance is an elaborate combination of navigation and meteorology. Throughout the northward flight, and on subsequent return trips since, the birds were diligently tracked by biologists from the International Crane Foundation and the Fish and Wildlife Service.

Both birders and biologists enthusiastically welcome the cranes back to their historical summering grounds. “It’s a phenomenal experience to see them come back,” says Molly Mehl, a biologist at Necedah. “Their presence reminds me how small we humans are in these wild places.” They spend about six months in Wisconsin, until that magical, also not yet fully understood, moment when the older whoopers decide to lift off again and head south, but this time on their own.

During the summer, the crane-costume-wearing biologists are busy training a new group of young, captive-reared birds for the next fall migration. These efforts are paying off handsomely. The new eastern migratory population now numbers 36, supplementing a group of about 90 nonmigratory cranes that live in Florida, and around 200 in the western migratory group. Many threats remain, including the loss of wetlands protections, and the continued threat of poaching and accidental death via power lines and other manmade objects. But the numbers are heartening and humbling.

“It’s phenomenal that we have these bird migrations where we haven’t seen them in 100 years,” says Joan Garland, from the International Crane Foundation. “People were responsible for pushing them to extinction, now we’re the ones bringing them back.” 

Staff writer/editor Bill Updike followed whooping cranes to both Florida and Wisconsin this year to gather material for this story.