Earth & Sky

The following individual was interviewed for today’s show. Our thanks to:

Dr. Thomas Stehn
Whooping Crane Coordinator
Aransas Wildlife National Refuge
US Fish and Wildlife Service

To find out how you can help the cranes, contact Operation Migration:

2731 Durham Regional Road 19
Blackstock, Ontario L0B 1B0
Canada

or go to go to the Operation Migration web site at

More Resources:

Whooping Crane Reintroduction Process (U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service)

Whooping Crane Eastern Partnership.

Operation Migration’s In the Field section of their excellent website chronicles in detail the epic flight.

To see an on-line video of the cranes’ training, go here.

Author’s Notes:

The world-wide total of whooping cranes, all of which are located in North America, is 402. (261 in the wild and 141 in captivity).

The whooping crane eats crabs, clams, frogs, and other aquatic organisms. Whooping cranes stand 5 feet tall and are pure white in color with black wing tips and a red crown.

It was probably take ten years to get enough cranes to establish a self-sustaining wild population with 1 to 2 dozen birds per year.

The project is sponsored by The National Wildlife Service working in partnership with a variety of state wildlife agencies, conservation groups and other private organizations.

It’s important to keep the birds isolated from people to keep them wild. the only people the young cranes have seen have been in crane costumes. They’ve never heard people talk.

Follow up call 12/3/01:

October 17 is the day that they actually departed.

ES: Is there an update?

TS: Well the news is that they reached their final stop in Florida this morning. They’ve been on the road all this time. And there should be a big press conference today and quite a bit of publicity. And then tomorrow they’re supposed to take the birds and fly them out to the salt marsh where they’re going to spend the winter. The refuge there is called Chassahowitzka National Wildlife Refuge. They’ve built quite an elaborate pen that will help the birds adjust from a captive situation to accommodating wild birds and getting them used to being in the wild. So then that process of turning them wild will start immediately. And so, within a week or so after arriving in the salt marsh tomorrow , they’ll be absolutely free to come and go from the pen whenever they want. And the pen is just a security blanket for them, something that they’re familiar with.

ES: Were the cranes that made the flight hatched by researchers or were they brought into the migration project as young chicks?

TS: No, they were hatched as part of this reintroduction project at the Patuxent Wildlife Research Center in Laurel, MD. Before they hatched out of the egg, airplane engine sounds were being played to them. So they were designated from before they hatched. In fact, as soon as the eggs were laid, they were designated for this project. And then they were raised hearing the airplane sounds, learning to follow behind a small ultralight aircraft, I mean just on the ground, taxiing so that they weren’t scared by that. Then at about 60 days of age they were shipped out to Wisconsin for the summer, and that’s when the real flight training began. We’d run down the taxi way, grass strip field, and then when they got old enough to fly they’d start “flight lessons.”

ES: So it’s taken a little over a month for them to complete their flight.

TS: Yeah, it’s been 48 days, I believe.

ES: And was it successful?

TS: They made it. Seven whooping cranes made it. They took 25 individual flights. The longest flight was two hours and 10 minutes, and the shortest flight was only 38 minutes. They proceeded south from Wisconsin to Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Tennessee, Georgia, and halfway through Florida. Twenty-three days were spent grounded due to bad weather, including a very strong storm that battered the travel pen used to house the cranes during the stopovers. And during that storm the birds escape from the pen. The pen was actually blown down on one side. And one of the birds, this was at night during the very strong storm, flew into a power line and was killed. So we lost the one bird on the migration. One bird, before we even started, we pulled him from the reintroduction program because he just wasn’t following the airplane. So that bird ended up in the New Orleans Zoo. And then one bird didn’t follow the plane very well. He’d start the flights off everyday, then he’d break off and then just land and sometimes go back to where they’d spent the night. So one crane has done the entire journey now in a pick-up truck. Everyday, when the other flock mates take off in the ultralight, this bird was put in a crate and trucked to the next destination. He would spend the day with the other members of the flock. When we think that this single bird that just spent the whole trip in the truck, we think that he’ll learn the correct wild behaviors from his flock mates. In the Spring we hope that he’ll migrates back with his flock mates. So it’s kind of a test of whether , if a few birds don’t follow the ultralight successfully, can we still get them reintroduced successfully into the wild.

ES: Isn’t the biggest challenge still ahead in trying to get the birds to go back to Wisconsin?

TS: The biggest challenge is getting them fully incorporated into the salt marsh habitat, into the Chassahowitzka National Wildlife Refuge where we hope they’ll winter. They’ve never been in salt marsh habitat. We’ve got to show them what to feed on. We’ll be catching blue crabs for them the first few days, picking the claws apart and swollowing the small pieces whole, that kind of thing. We think that they’ll learn that extremely quickly. There’s all kinds of snails around the release pen sight, clams… So I think this transition into the wild will go very, very fast. And as long as we’re safe from predators this winter, we have 100% confidence that they’re going to fly back to Wisconsin. The technique is that good. So I don’t think that the flight back is going to cause them trouble, that is if they stay away from power lines and all that. Now we’ve got radios on all of the birds, and we’ve also got satellite transmitters on three of the birds, so that during the spring migration, every two days we’ll get a location that bounces up to a satellite and then back to us. We can pinpoint within a mile where that bird is. So this will give us a pretty good ability to know at all times where that bird is. So we won’t actually have to have anybody track them north next spring. We will have somebody in a pickup truck, trying to stay up with them in likely stopovers. Probably the main data we’ll get is from the satellite transmitters. Here’s some more numbers for you: total miles 1193 miles, 48 days. It was really frustrating. Most of that was just waiting out bad weather. And then as they got south, with the temperatures warmer, the birds don’t like flying as well in the warm temperatures. There were days near the end there where they’d only go twenty miles. and then in an hour, an hour and a half of flying they’d have to wait till the next day. A very long trip. The people who took part were extremely dedicated. You know they’ve been away from home for five and a half months since these chicks hatched. they’ve been working with the chicks ever since May. So it’s been a long time for them.

ES: Is there anything that you’d like to add for the listeners of Earth and Sky?

TS: Well, we certainly hope to do this for several years. This is not just a one-time migration. We’re planning to fly birds south for the next five years, maybe as many as ten, and we hope to do more birds next year [2002], somewhere closer to 15, maybe 20 to follow the ultralight next year. Our overall goal is to get 125 birds in the flock successfully making the migration. And then they’ll start breeding, and we’ll have a reintroduction that’s successful. It’s going to be a number of years of continuing these yearly flights, depending on what the survival rates are, to know whether it’s fully successful.