Science / Medicine : Whooping Cranes Stretching Out : Breeding: One of the world’s most endangered family of birds is coming back from brink of extinction. Aviculturists go to any lengths, including performing the ritual mating dance, to save the species.

Into the west-blowing wind, Marianne Wellington sprints uphill, flapping her arms up and down. She is calling, “Prrrr! Prrrrrr!” rolling the r’s in a high-pitched trill.

Behind her follow eight cinnamon-brown chicks on two-foot-long pinkish legs, leaping and flapping. From eggs laid in the wild in Northwest Territories, Canada, and hatched in captivity in Wisconsin, the chicks, ranging in age from 7 to 9 weeks, are just discovering what their newly feathered wings are for.

Crane mothering is tiring. “I can only take so much running and then I have to rest,” said Wellington.

At least she knows her colleagues will not laugh at her. At various times, many of them have run around wearing crane costumes and frog-walked backward while operating a crane puppet.

For here at the International Crane Foundation, no challenge is too great--nor any effort too silly looking to try--when it comes to breeding and raising cranes, one of the world’s most endangered family of birds. Today at the facility, the endangered whooping crane is the beneficiary of one of the most intensive and innovative efforts staged to protect an American species.

Whooping cranes, the tallest birds in North America, once whitened the skies with their migrations. Nearly as tall as a man, with a wingspan that Icarus would envy and the voice of a siren’s wail, the whooping crane is one of the most spectacular birds in North America--and one of the rarest.

There are about 235 whooping cranes left on the planet, victims of shrinking wetland habitat. All are descendants of the remnant population of 15 birds counted in 1941 at their summering grounds at Aransas National Wildlife Refuge in Texas--a population that is now protected by U.S. and Canadian law.

“The whooping crane’s return from the brink of extinction is one of the most encouraging stories in conservation,” said George Archibald, founder of ICF.

To save the crane, aviculturists and ornithologists here have dressed up like cranes, incubated crane chicks under chickens, and treated birds with deformed legs with hydrotherapy. Archibald has even acted as surrogate mate to a captive female, performing the species’ elaborate courtship dance--and personally incubating a crane egg under his sleeping bag.

Foundation staff have successfully bred 14 of the world’s 15 crane species. They were the first in the world to breed the rare Siberian and hooded cranes native to Asia; the first in North America to breed Brolga cranes, native to Australia, and the first--just last month--to hatch a black-necked crane chick outside of its native China.

Because of ICF’s success, the private foundation was selected this year to receive 12 crane eggs removed from the nests of whoopers breeding in Canada’s Wood Buffalo National Park in the Northwest Territories. Jim Lewis, director of the National Whooping Crane Recovery Team, said that whooping cranes normally lay two eggs per nest, but only one chick typically survives the summer. Artificially incubating the eggs allows twice as many cranes to survive as would in the wild.

Two months ago, they hatched out of brown-speckled, greenish eggs warmed and moistened in incubators. The whooping chicks were fed by puppets so the chicks will know they are whooping cranes and be able to select appropriate mates, said Wellington.

Wearing a white-sleeved glove with a crane-faced head and scissors-like beak, crane aviculturists learn to walk backward, squatting, trying to get the uncoordinated babies to eat moistened crane chow off the red spoon protruding from the puppet’s mouth. All the while, they must play a tape recording of the purring brood call of the adult female crane--a sound solicited for the recording by stroking a captive female’s back and tail, mimicking the pre-copulatory behavior of the male.

“The secret to breeding these birds in captivity is a lot of tender loving care,” Archibald said.

For a captive female whooper named Tex, that tender loving care extended to Archibald actually becoming her mate. Tex, born at the San Antonio Zoo in 1967, had been raised in the living room of zoo director Fred Stark. The result of its craneless chickhood was a lifelong preference for people instead of whooping cranes. When it was passed on to Patuxent Wildlife Research Center near Laurel, Md., Tex was unrelentingly cold to potential mates. So the Wildlife Service gave it to Archibald in 1976, who at that time was beginning to gather crane species for breeding.

To bring Tex to breeding condition required a suitable suitor, but a real crane would not do. So Archibald courted the human-imprinted crane. He moved in with it, sleeping on a cot in its pen for a month. Tex fell in love.

When spring came, Archibald’s attentions increased. Imitating the balletic leaping, bowing, bobbing, wing-spreading and neck-flinging of the male partner, he performed the crane courtship dance for it. To his joy, Tex responded, dancing its part.

The dance, researchers believe, is a necessary step in getting the crane to ovulate. It was artificially inseminated with semen from a male whooping crane at Patuxent, and in 1982, after several failures, it laid a fertile, healthy egg. In the territory Archibald and Tex had staked out on a grassy hillside, the two gathered nesting material, foraged together, danced and co-incubated the precious egg. Archibald piled his sleeping bag on the nest and set up a card table so he could read and write while keeping the egg warm. Meanwhile, Tex went foraging.

Later that season, Tex was tragically eaten by a raccoon, but the egg survived in an incubator. Gee Whiz hatched on the first of June.

Today, Gee Whiz is “a great big beautiful whooping crane,” Archibald said with a father’s pride. Unlike its mother, Gee Whiz knows it is a crane and will be able to select and court an appropriate mate.

Instilling “whooperness” in the cranes is a science of its own, as Patuxent staff discovered when it began its breeding program in 1973. Until last fall, Patuxent had the only captive breeding flock of whoopers in the nation; last year, 22 birds--half of the Maryland flock--were moved to Baraboo, to protect the captives from a single disaster or disease wiping out the population.

These chicks will stay at ICF as breeding stock, but their offspring are slated for release in Florida in 1992, forming a new, non-migratory flock of birds where a vanished flock once wintered. Because today’s chicks are tomorrow’s breeders, these cranes are taught to tolerate, not fear, their keepers.

For others slated for release into the wild, different protocols are used. That is where the crane costumes come in.

Wild cranes are justifiably afraid of humans, who may illegally hunt them or disturb their nests. To make sure the group to be released retains that healthy fear, ICF ethologist Robert Horwich makes sure he is not mistaken for a human. He dresses up his full body in the garb of a crane.

The costume he designed looks like something you might see in a Halloween parade--one sleeve ends with a puppet head, the other is covered in cloth feathers. Horwich’s body is draped with a gray sheet, and his face is covered with an opaque black patch to mimic the sandhill’s markings.

Horwich worked with five sandhills until they were fledglings, 10 weeks old, and outfitted with radio collars for tracking. They were moved to Necedah National Wildlife Refuge, 55 miles north of the foundation’s headquarters, where they joined a wild group and migrated south to winter in Florida. “It makes me feel we’ve done the right thing, to release them and have them join their own kind,” Horwich said.

Since 1985, his method has been successfully tried on three other captive-hatched species slated for release: red-crowned cranes, Siberian cranes and Eastern Sarus cranes.

As less-developed countries begin their captive-breeding programs, the foundation offers expertise and advice. Because countries such as China are less likely to have newfangled incubators on hand, ICF is experimenting with a low-tech solution: chickens. Cochin hens will happily incubate crane eggs, and this year’s experiments with red-crowned, white-naped and sandhill cranes will determine if the method works.

For foreign conservationists, the whooping crane’s comeback, and ICF’s success, are welcome models. “The whooper is like the legendary phoenix bird that rose from the ashes,” said Archibald. “Not all endangered species are doomed.”