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Recently, my wife and I were out for an afternoon
of birding at the Middle Fork River Forest Preserve in the northeast corner of
Champaign County, when we came upon a pair of birds I’ll never forget. They
were nearly five feet tall with long black legs and snowy white feathers, red
caps, black masks and bright yellow eyes. Although I had never before seen them
in person, I knew immediately they were whooping cranes.
Whooping cranes occur only in North America and
they were apparently never very common. Their numbers plummeted through the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries as a result of unregulated hunting and habitat
destruction. At three points in the 1940s and 50s, the total population of whooping
cranes dipped to 23 birds, with just 16 individuals in the only remaining wild
flock at one time. Since then, some of the most intensive, coordinated species
recovery efforts ever mounted have brought whooping cranes back from the
brink--very slowly, and with plenty of bumps in the road.
The conspicuous banding on the pair of whooping
cranes my wife and I observed indicates they are the result of one of these
efforts, a collaboration among state, federal and nonprofit agencies called the
Whooping Crane Eastern Partnership. The purpose of the partnership is to
establish a self-sustaining migratory population of whooping cranes in eastern
North America.
This is a critical addition to the wild population
in the west, which breeds in northern Alberta and spends the winter in Texas
near the Gulf of Mexico. That’s because a single disaster, such as a hurricane,
could kill them all at once.
Chicks destined for the eastern migratory flock are
hatched from eggs produced by captive breeding pairs and raised according to
careful protocols to ensure they grow up understanding themselves to be
whooping cranes, not people.
During their first year, some of these chicks participate
in Operation Migration (OM). They learn to fly behind an ultralight aircraft,
which then “teaches” them to migrate from their summer home in Wisconsin, to a
National Wildlife Refuge in Florida where they spend the winter. The female of
the pair we saw is a graduate of this program.
Other chicks destined for the eastern flock are
part of an experiment called Direct Autumn Release. Instead of learning to
follow an ultralight, they’re released among wild cranes and learn the
migration route from them. The male of the pair we saw came from this program.
The whooping cranes we saw formed a bond in the
summer of 2010 and have been together since. They have nested and produced
eggs, but have yet to succeed with a chick. Fortunately, whooping cranes can
live into their mid twenties, so there is plenty of room to hope for them as a
pair.
There
is also room to hope for whooping cranes as a species. Roughly 400 of them currently
live in the wild and another 200 are held at research and breeding facilities.
It’s
natural to celebrate the recovery of whooping cranes as a conservation success,
and certainly many smart, dedicated people deserve boatloads of credit for
working to make it happen. But whooping cranes are among the most beautiful
creatures that have ever lived. It’s a little more difficult to believe humans
can muster the collective will to stop the ongoing destruction of so many
other, less charismatic species around the globe.
