“I’m not a sentimental person,” said whooper enthusiast Karen Murphy, who lives near St. Marks Wildlife Refuge in St. Marks, Florida, one of the places where the birds winter. “But my God, when you see a whooping crane soar, it’s emotional.”
The rescuers — a team of scientists, government officials, ultralight pilots, nonprofit organizers, philanthropists and volunteers — come across as humble, focused more on the day-to-day activity of the birds than on their extraordinary battle against extinction.
But they do recognize the magnitude of guaranteeing the existence of Grus Americana.
“We’re reintroducing this bird for a whole number of reasons. For one, it deserves to be here. And, if you save whooping cranes, you have to save habitat. And habitat also is essential for our survival,” said Joseph Duff, CEO and co-founder of Operation Migration Inc., the nonprofit playing a crucial role in establishing the Eastern Migratory Flock of cranes. Operation Migration helps prepare juvenile whoopers for migration and leads the young cranes to Florida using ultralight aircraft, with Duff as the lead pilot.
In early April, Duff was at OM’s headquarters in Ontario, Canada, where he awaited reports from the cranes’ winter grounds in Florida, and from Wisconsin, where a ground crew eagerly awaited the return of the birds.
As WiG went to press, one crane in the 2014 class — “7-14,” for the hatch order and year — and two adult cranes arrived in Marquette County, Wisconsin. Five other class members went soaring on April 3, departing with an adult crane to guide them to central Wisconsin. The next morning, the cranes were over Alabama.
For the Operation Migration crew, the spring migration is a real test of their feathered students.
The class of 2014 began the 1,250-mile trek from Wisconsin’s White River Marsh to Florida last October. But bad weather kept grounding the cranes and the ultralights. The flyers covered just 52 miles in 32 days. Eventually, the team had to crate the birds and move on to Carroll, Tennessee, skipping miles on the migration route for a species that learns to fly by “imprinting.”
“We’ve never broken their train of knowledge,” Duff said. “So the big concern: How do they know the way back?”
Crane 7-14 returned to Wisconsin without having flown part of the route in the fall, but the question remains for the others, who were over Kentucky on April 8.
Wonderful whoopers
Whooping cranes are remarkable birds, a species that dates back 50 million years. Adult cranes stand 5 feet tall, with a wingspan of more than 7 feet. They are bright white, with a crown of red and wings tipped with black.
“To see one in the wild would be at the top of any birder’s lifelist,” said Charlie McCurdy, a Wisconsin bird-watcher who follows Operation Migration cranes online, including on the Crane Cam.
Decades of unregulated hunting and destruction of their habitat nearly destroyed the species. Today just one self-sustaining wild population exists — the birds that summer in the Northwest Territories of Canada and winter at the Aransas National Wildlife Refuge in Texas. The long-term fate of the species remains uncertain.
By the early 1960s, concerned that disease or a single weather catastrophe could wipe out the flock, conservationists began exploring ways to establish new populations. In 1975, scientists collected whooper eggs from nests in Canada and placed them with sandhill cranes at Gray’s Lake National Wildlife Refuge in Idaho, finding some success.
But by the mid-1990s, conservationists were seriously looking at the novel idea of using ultralight aircraft to teach juvenile whooping cranes to migrate. And, by 2001, the Whooping Crane Eastern Partnership began introducing a new migratory flock — the Wisconsin birds — into North America. Additionally, non-migratory flocks were introduced in Florida and Louisiana.
Approval for the migratory whooping crane program followed other successful test programs. Operation Migration already had ultralight pilots leading Canada geese, trumpeter swans and sandhill cranes on migrations.
Canadian naturalist Bill Carrick, in the 1980s, learned he could imprint Canada geese to follow his boat. Then Canadian ultralight pilot Bill Lishman succeeded in 1988 in flying with geese. He documented the adventure in C’mon Geese, an award-winning video that caught the attention of Terry Kohler of Sheboygan.
Kohler, a pilot, environmentalist and longtime supporter of the International Crane Foundation in Baraboo, showed the video to George Archibald, ICF co-founder and a world-renowned crane expert.
An idea was hatched
“George contacted Bill and Bill was interested. He asked me. I said sure,” Duff recalled. “And the more I got involved, the more interested I became.”
But before the first successful ultralight migration with whoopers, there were other adventures. Lishman recruited Duff, a pilot and commercial photographer, to fly with 18 Canada geese from Ontario to Virginia, in 1993 — a trip documented by ABC’s 20/20.
A year later, Operation Migration became a Canadian charity. And the next year, Lishman and Duff formed a production company and partnered with Columbia Pictures to produce Fly Away Home, a film starring Jeff Daniels and Anna Paquin and telling a fictionalized story about a man migrating with geese.
Duff chuckled when asked about continued interest in the movie.
“It was a long time ago,” said Duff, who trained the geese for the film and provided footage. “It was a lot of fun to do it and gave us some funding.”
The film brought fame to Operation Migration’s work.
And then, in 1998, there was more fame.
Building a recovery
Operation Migration’s successes with other species convinced the International Whooping Crane Recovery Team that cranes could imprint and follow an ultralight along a pre-determined migratory route to winter grounds.
“Our aircraft creates a wake behind it,” Duff said. And the birds feel that and learn to fly in a long line off the wing tip. “If we match the speed perfectly, then the bird just hangs there, just gets carried along by the aircraft.”
The Whooping Crane Eastern Partnership was formed in 1999. Founding members include the International Crane Foundation, the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, Operation Migration, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Patuxent Wildlife Research Center, Wildlife Health Center, Whooping Crane Recovery Team, Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources and Wisconsin Natural Resources Foundation.
The goal is to have a flock of 125 birds in Wisconsin by 2020, including 25 nesting pairs producing 18–20 chicks a year. The federal goal for the species in North America is to establish a self-sustaining population of at least 1,000 cranes by 2035.
The captive-born cranes in the class of 2014 hatched at the U.S. Geological Survey’s Patuxent Wildlife Research Center in Laurel, Maryland, home to the world’s largest breeding flock of whoopers.
There, and at every station throughout the program, caretakers conceal their humanness from the cranes. Chicks exposed to humans become imprinted on them. So, even though caretakers act as surrogate parents, they do so in costumes. They don’t speak in the company of cranes. They use crane puppets when feeding the birds. They shield the birds from man-made structures and equipment. They play tapes of bird calls in the hatchery, the pens and from the aircraft. The caretakers and trainers also play recordings of ultralight aircraft engine noise, helping the birds imprint on the aircraft and conditioning them to fly with the machine — if only for the southern migration.
Before fledging, the cranes go from Patuxent to Wisconsin for flight lessons. Initially, populations were introduced in Wisconsin at Necedah National Wildlife Refuge, which remains the summer breeding ground for much of the Eastern flock.
However, black flies proved a problem at Necedah, and the summer trainings were relocated five years ago to the “Wisconsin Rectangle,” a wetlands area that includes Horicon National Wildlife Refuge and White River Marsh.
Last fall, the cranes departed for Florida from the White River Marsh.
And that’s where 7-14 headed this spring.
“We’re really pleased,” Duff said.
But much work remains to protect the species.
“When you save a whooping crane, you have to save habitat, and everything else that makes a wetland work,” said Duff. “You see, conservation is not just nice to do. It’s important to our survival.”
Overhead …
Operation Migration flyover and stopover sites, from Wisconsin to Florida in the fall and Florida to Wisconsin in the spring, include, by county:
WISCONSIN: Green Lake, Marquette, Columbia, Green and Winnebago.
ILLINOIS: LaSalle, Livingston, Piatt, Cumberland and Wayne.
KENTUCKY: Union and Marshall.
TENNESSEE: Carroll, Hardin.
ALABAMA: Walker, Chilton, Lowndes, Pike.
GEORGIA: Decatur.
FLORIDA: Leon and Wakulla.
Source: Operation Migration