COLUMN ONE : Siberian Cranes’ Sad Odyssey : The majestic birds have long made the dangerous winter trek from Russia to India. Now the skies are empty as scientists struggle to save a species devastated by war and political turmoil.

For millions of years, one of nature’s rituals has repeated itself with mysterious, majestic clockwork. Now, it seems, the clock has stopped.

That’s what Dr. Asad Rahmani, professor at the Aligarh Muslim University, concluded to his dismay when, a few days ago, he came to these marshlands 40 miles west of the Taj Mahal with both foreboding and hope in his heart.

For as long as people can recall, the largest, most conspicuous of cranes, the Siberian, has made the long flight southward from its breeding grounds in the Ob River basin to winter here in the warm, grassy wetlands of northern India.

Standing 4 1/2 feet tall, scarlet-faced and clad in snow-white plumage, the birds must negotiate one of the most harrowing avian flight paths in the world: a 3,000-mile arc over seven countries, including war-devastated Afghanistan, where they may be shot for food, and Pakistan, where cranes are ensnared to serve as winged watchdogs.

In the winter of 1964-65, 200 of the hardy visitors from Russia completed the two-month trek from the water-logged tundra around to the north reaches of the Ob to the temperate safety of Keoladeo’s 11 square miles.

By 1990-91, the number dropped to 10, and in 1992-93, to five.

Last winter, despite a unique U.S.-Russian effort that had weathered the suspicions and hostility of the Cold War, no Siberians came.

This winter, Indian bird fanciers, straining to hear the crane’s soft, musical “koonk-koonk,” scanned the skies once again in vain.

“I think it is the end of a dream for me,” said Rahmani, chairman of his university’s Center of Wildlife and Ornithology. “To see a Siberian crane--that was always a thrilling and inspiring experience. To know they had come from all that far away, and across such hostile country. I’m sad about it, and don’t think we have done enough to save these birds.”

There now appear to be about 3,000 “Sibes,” as they are nicknamed, left in the wild. Three of them are at Keoladeo, not because they flew in under their own wing power, but because people brought them here in boxes.

The story of the three birds is the chronicle of a remarkable wildlife conservation effort by specialists from several countries, including the United States. It has utilized high-tech gizmos such as satellite transmitters, but also puppets and people costumed as surrogate crane parents.

Unfortunately, the story of this campaign to revive the Sibe flocks does not have a happy ending.

At least not yet.

For the birds appear to have paid a heavy toll for Russia’s domestic turmoil, the Afghan civil war and the subordination of nature to economic imperatives in lands as diverse as China, India and the newly independent republics of Central Asia. Plus they continue to run what is believed to be the greatest risk to their survival of all: a gantlet of hunters along sections of their migration route.

At the end of that line lies Keoladeo, well-known to bird fanciers of many countries.

A national park since 1982, the facility near the Rajasthani town of Bharatpur is home to no fewer than 354 bird species, according to the World Wide Fund for Nature-India. It is refuge to cranes, Dalmatian pelicans, adjutant storks, spoonbills, marbled and Baikal teal, red kites, imperial and Pallas’ fishing eagles and other endangered and rare species.

But for many visitors, a glimpse of the endangered visitors from Siberia, known scientifically as Grus leucogeranus , is the highlight.

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One afternoon this winter, guide Arun K. Bhatt directed a party of three rickshaws down a path between two jheels , or shallow lakes, to show visitors the Sibes. The rickshaws came to a break in the trees, and Bhatt told the drivers to stop peddling. “Look there,” he whispered.

About a hundred yards away, gleaming like twin snowballs in the afternoon sun, a pair of Siberian cranes elegantly picked their way through the cool waters, peering into the grasses for sedge tubers and other comestibles.

The male, nicknamed Bugle, and the female, Gorby, were two of half a dozen birds hatched in captivity and brought here from the United States and Russia in December, 1992, and November, 1993, as part of the international campaign to boost the Sibes’ numbers.

The hope was that the juveniles would mingle with cranes from Russia and return home to breed with them. It didn’t happen. Since then, there have been no birds to mingle with.

“The setback to the experiment is that the Siberian cranes have totally stopped coming to India,” said Arzinder Singh Brar, the park’s field director.

One of the most ancient types of bird, the crane family is 35 million to 45 million years old. “There were cranes when there were dinosaurs,” said George Archibald, director of the nonprofit International Crane Foundation of Baraboo, Wis., which is in the vanguard of efforts to save the Sibes.

In the modern world, these graceful waders seem to have the odds stacked against them. From Asia to North America, the gobbling up of marshes for farmland, suburban housing developments and other purposes has devastated their numbers. Of 15 species of crane, seven are now listed as endangered.

The epitome of fidelity, Sibes mate for life, have a low reproductive capacity and require a territory of 7 1/2 to 11 1/2 square miles for successful breeding. At the slightest disturbance, they flee the nest.

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In their summer habitat near the Arctic Circle, Sibes’ nests, which they build in frigid marshes, are sometimes trampled by herds of domesticated reindeer. To add to their problems, the land may soon be overrun by drillers seeking to boost economically strapped Russia’s petroleum output.

Each adult female lays two eggs in spring. Then, it seems, she and her mate raise just one hatchling. The other, unlucky chick may fall to predators or to its sibling. In any case, a pair of Sibes has never winged into Keoladeo with more than one youngster in tow.

The collapse of the Soviet Empire struck the dwindling species a great blow, because Russia has less money than ever to finance helicopter surveys of the bird’s sprawling marshy habitat or for other protective measures. Some former Soviet republics on the migration route, including Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, have not yet shown great concern for nature.

Farther south, in an Afghanistan so shattered by war that it has virtually ceased to exist as a nation-state, “there’s nobody to talk to” about the Sibes, said David Ferguson, an official of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service involved in preservation since 1980.

Still farther along the fly-way, Ferguson said, it’s not even known at what spot the cranes--soaring more than three miles high in the cold, rarefied air to clear the Hindu Kush mountains--cross into Pakistan.

There are at least two other known Siberian crane populations, the larger of which spends summers in Yakutia, about 1,200 miles northeast of the Ob, and migrates to China. A decade ago, Archibald counted 1,350 Sibes at that flock’s winter quarters at Poyang Lake in China’s Jianxi province. The eastern flock’s size has risen to an estimated 3,000 birds.

But Archibald says widespread hunting, the vigorous draining of China’s swamps and marshes and construction that recently began on the colossal Three Gorges Dam upstream on the Yangtze River combine to put the birds and Poyang Lake at risk.

As for the use of human foster parents, it was developed by one of Archibald’s colleagues to restore the population of another species at risk, the whooping crane, in the United States. Chicks are raised by people clad in crane costumes; they use hand puppets and taped crane calls to enhance the realism. A fear of humans is instilled in young birds, to increase their chances of survival in the wild.

In 1974, Archibald and his colleagues started talking with Soviet counterparts about the status of the Sibes. Eggs were brought to the United States, and captive breeding of Siberian cranes began in 1981, long after superpower detente had collapsed. Now, “species banks” totaling about 120 birds have been established in Baraboo, the Oka nature preserve south of Moscow and at Vogel Park Walsrode, Germany.

At Baraboo, where 30 adult birds live, each year a few chicks are hatched, while other fertilized eggs are sent to Russia for incubation there. Archibald estimates that it costs his donor-supported foundation $2,000 to raise each hatchling. The problem now, he said, is not in breeding Sibes, since in captivity each pair’s fertility can be boosted to seven to nine eggs each spring; it’s in inserting eggs or young birds into the wild Sibes’ life cycle to revive their flocks.

Over three summers, starting in 1991, Sibes from the species banks were brought to Siberia and made to mingle with wild birds. The idea: With the advent of cold weather, the cranes would fly together to Keoladeo.

In 1992, one juvenile did migrate south with a pair of common, or Eurasian, cranes. The next year, two youngsters took off with a family of Sibes. But none of the captivity-bred birds made it to Keoladeo.

Attempts to get birds raised by humans to fly in the other direction, from India to Siberia, were no more successful. In December, 1992, two young males, White and Bugle, were brought to Keoladeo, where they were released among five Siberian natives. When the wild flock flew north, it left the interlopers behind. “Social bonds with cranes require two weeks at a minimum,” Archibald said. “These birds had less than a week together.”

Four more youngsters, including Gorby, were brought to the park in November, 1993, but that was the first winter that no Sibes came from Russia.

Last July, White died of a punctured windpipe, loser in a turf war with a stork. Billy, who arrived at the same time as Gorby, died of hemorrhagic shock in the Jaipur zoo, where the younger birds were quartered during India’s hot summer. Another newcomer, Boris, flew away with common cranes and cannot be found, said Brar, the park’s field director.

So just three human-raised birds are left.

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The failure to date of scientists to restore the Sibes’ migration cycle has forced experts to consider new, rival strategies. Rahmani said one plan, still subject to government approval, is to bring in 15 to 20 youngsters from Wisconsin and allow them to roam Keoladeo year round. “We want to develop a resident population in Bharatpur,” he said. “It’s just a last try, to be sure that we have a small population of Siberian cranes.”

Because of the birds’ longevity, which can exceed 80 years, introducing seven to eight Sibes a year would soon achieve a stable, long-lived resident colony, Rahmani added. With any luck, like Boris, they would become friends with common cranes and fly to Russia with them.

It is true that the Sibes raised by humans and kept at Keoladeo throughout 1994 did not appear to suffer from summer temperatures exceeding 110 degrees, if guaranteed a water supply. But Archibald contends it would be a “miracle” if they mated in conditions so unlike Siberia’s cool. In his mind, the strongest objection to trying to revive the Siberia-to-India migration route still is that it crosses lands that are still too risky for the cranes.

He is placing his hopes on a third, tiny group of birds: the seven to nine Sibes reported to be wintering this year in lowlands of Iran near the Caspian Sea. His educated guess is that there is a third, as yet undiscovered breeding ground in Russia, likely west of the Ob and the Urals, where the cranes now in Iran spend the summer.

Next week, Archibald will fly to Tehran, with two young Sibes in plywood boxes in the cargo hold of an airliner. The birds, equipped with transmitters, will be released among their feathered kin in Iran. He hopes that the juveniles will fly north in March, while emitting pulses that can be tracked by satellite, and show whether there is a third breeding ground in Russia.

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There is another option. A common crane, nesting alongside Sibes, was tracked as it migrated in 1990. It spent the winter in an isolated valley in northeastern Iran, near the Afghan border. Last year, three Sibes migrated from the Ob with common cranes and may have gone to the same locale.

Archibald will search for them next month, with hope their winter quarters, and safer migration route, could replace Keoladeo or another patch of India’s shrinking wetlands where a handful of Sibes may be spending the winter in secret. Birds hatched in captivity could be introduced into the crane life cycle at the Iran wintering grounds or at the still-to-be-discovered breeding site in Russia.

Even in the worst case, nature’s ancient rite of Sibes flying to and from India may not be gone forever. It is true that cranes learn migration routes by flying with other birds. But even if Sibes have stopped coming to Keoladeo, humans may someday be able to act as surrogate flight instructors.

Using a technique pioneered with Canada geese, an ultra-light airplane next year will try to imprint migration routes onto the memories of sandhill cranes in the prairie provinces of Canada. One day, it may be the turn of a community of Sibes, threatened survivors of a species that has inhabited Russia for an eternity, to relearn the flight path of its ancestors from a human pilot.

“If that flock can continue by the grace of God, perhaps some day we could lead them back to India with an ultra-light,” Archibald said.