Whooping Crane
Whooping Crane
The tallest bird in North America – five feet tall and white as snow, with black wingtips and a splash of red on the crown –whooping cranes once nested from Canada’s parkland to the prairies of the upper Midwest, and perhaps as far east as the Carolinas. In winter, the crane’s trumpeting call could be heard from the Chesapeake south to the Gulf Coast and Florida. But reckless gunning reduced the cranes to a few dozen by the twentieth century, and even with the dawn of wiser policies toward endangered species, the whooper teetered on the brink.
“The whooping crane is doomed to extinction,” noted ornithologist Edward Howe Forbush predicted flatly in the early 1900s – and there was little to suggest otherwise.
Now, there are nearly 540 in several wild and captive flocks – but they still aren’t out of the woods.
A major cause of mortality in whooping cranes is collision with power lines on their 1,200-mile migration between Canada and Texas. Newly planned wind farms could be a real hazard for the birds. Cranes, as far as researchers know, aren’t killed by turbines, but those wind farms will require thousands of miles of new power lines right in the middle of their migration route.
Another obstacle, true for all migrating birds, is eroding wetlands and development in areas where the birds stop to feed on their migration routes and where they winter. The original wild flock of cranes nests in remote Wood Buffalo National Park in the Northwest Territories and Alberta, then migrates 1,200 miles south to the Aransas National Wildlife Refuge on the coast of Texas. But marshes near it are being eaten up for housing developments, and the river water that keeps the salinity of the estuaries perfect for blue crabs – the whoopers’ main food – is being diverted to urban centers like San Antonio.
Whooping Crane Solutions
The original wild flock reached a record 266 cranes in 2007. A nonmigratory flock of about 30 cranes, established in 1993, lives in central Florida, and the International Crane Foundation, working with partners including the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and Operation Migration, has also created a flock of more than 90 whoopers that migrate between Wisconsin and Florida, with ultralight planes leading a fresh batch of chicks south every autumn.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has issued a position paper on mitigating crane collisions with wind energy turbines and power lines in their migration corridor(s). The U.S.F.W.S. recommends a number of innovative ways to mitigate or avoid loss of cranes to power lines. http://www.fws.gov/southwest/es/oklahoma/Documents/Wind Power/Documents/Whooping Crane and Wind Development FWS issue paper – final April 2009.pdf
Because cranes have a long migration, much of what counts towards success in protecting their corridor(s) is conservation and management of the places where they must land. (Whooping cranes land every night during their migration.) Two recent projects are particularly innovative:
FACT – Farming And Conservation Together; private landowners and conservation professionals are making good on a promise to enhance and restore natural landscapes as well as keep farmers and other residents on their land. (For more information contact Eric Schlender at pheasant1@lycos.com)
Potato Collaboration – The International Crane Foundation is a part of a collaboration (WWF/WPVGA/UW Collaboration)between the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), the Wisconsin Potato and Vegetable Growers Association (WPVGA), and the University of Wisconsin – Madison (UW). The collaboration’s goal is to work towards more ecologically sound potato and vegetable agricultural systems while also improving ecosystem restoration wetlands, grasslands, and savannas (including crane habitat), soil health, water quality, and many other resources that come from private lands.
Inspiring Person: Whooping Cranes
George Archibald was a Ph.D. student at Cornell in the 1970s when he began to work with cranes.
“I knew that if you did the right thing with the birds in captivity, you could produce a ton of cranes,” Archibald told writer, Scott Weidensaul, who has written extensively about birds and furnished the information for this profile. (http://www.scottweidensaul.com) So in 1973, Archibald and a fellow Cornell student named Ron Sauey founded the International Crane Foundation on the horse farm owned by Sauey’s parents just north of Baraboo, Wisconsin. Horse stalls were converted to crane pens, enclosures built, and an incubator installed
For Archibald, doing “the right thing” meant, among other things, leaping and dancing like a male crane to bring a human-imprinted female whooper named Tex into breeding condition, then using artificial insemination to allow her to raise a chick – called Gee Whiz.
Today, Archibald is universally recognized as the world’s foremost authority on cranes.
For more on whooping cranes go to http://www.savingcranes.org/abouticf.html