A Hand for the Whooping Crane

The gangly young whooping crane flapped its gawky wings and began chasing a wingless ultralight aircraft around and around a circular pen.

Only 55 days old but already 20 inches tall, it had been taken from its parents before it hatched and trained to see the tiny flying machine as its mom.

Monday’s demonstration at the Patuxent Research Refuge in Maryland was part of a project to help preserve one of the world’s rarest birds. The fledgling is one of 10 birds in an experimental U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service effort to reintroduce whooping cranes to what was once their dominant migratory route.

The experiment hinges on whether the little cranes have really come to see the skeletal plane as their parent. If they have, they will follow it along the 1,130-mile journey that they, and their progeny, will repeat year after year.

Next week, the birds will be transported to central Wisconsin, where they will spend the summer learning to fly and bonding with the plane and its trainers. Dressed in white from head to toe, the trainers have been feeding the chicks with arm puppets resembling the long, elegant necks and red-crowned heads of adult whooping cranes.

In October, if all goes as planned, the young cranes will follow the plane, flown by a pilot in a crane costume, from Wisconsin to Florida’s Gulf Coast. Ultralights make the best surrogate mothers because they are the only aircraft that can fly slow enough without stalling for the birds to keep up. They have led successful migratory flights for geese and sandhill cranes, close relatives of whooping cranes.

But this project marks the first time the planes have been used to help reestablish an endangered species.

Marshall Jones, acting director of the Fish and Wildlife Service, called the project “the wildlife equivalent of putting a man on the moon.” But, he added, “unlike the voyage to the moon, we hope the cranes will be part of a continuing migration.”

The stately whooping crane, which stands 5 feet high with a 7-foot wingspan as an adult, is the tallest bird in North America. Its feathers are snowy white with jet black wingtips. It gets its name from its shrill, bugle-like call.

The birds numbered about 1,400 in 1860, but their population dwindled to a mere 15 migrating birds by 1941 because of hunting and loss of wetlands, which were drained for farmland. Because of their majestic stature and dire status, whooping cranes became a cause celebre of the endangered species movement in the 1950s.

Because of successful conservation efforts, the birds have been making a comeback. There are now 187 birds in the lone migrating flock, which breeds in Canada and winters on the Texas Gulf Coast, at the Aransas National Wildlife Refuge. A second, nonmigratory flock of about 75 birds lives year-round in central Florida.

But the species’ survival remains in question because of threats ranging from crashes into fences to casualties from extreme weather. With only one migratory flock, the birds are particularly vulnerable. Whooping cranes will not be removed from the endangered list until there are at least two migratory flocks.

The 10 chicks that are bonding with the ultralight at the Fish and Wildlife Service’s refuge here, 20 miles north of Washington, could put their species on the path toward obtaining that goal.

On Monday, guests hid behind a camouflaged fence at the refuge to watch the unconventional ritual of a trainer, dressed as a mother crane, taxiing around in a bright yellow aircraft. The trainer lured a fledgling to follow the plane by using the arm puppet to drop mealworms onto the grass. Molded from an actual crane, the puppet has a long, slender neck, a red crown, a long, gray-brown beak and yellow eyes.

After stopping momentarily to drop the worms, the puppet pecked the ground to simulate how a parent crane draws an offspring’s attention to food. A loudspeaker mounted on the ultralight played a recording of the deep purring call that cranes use to comfort their young and urge them to follow.

Around and around they went, with the mechanical mom leading the way and the fledgling scampering to get the worms. The chick peeped and, when it saw the worms, made an excited, trilling sound, trainer Dan Sprague said.

“The whole activity needs to be fun or they won’t do it,” said Sprague, who manned the ultralight. “It’s a chance to come out with mom, who they always love to be with.”

The training process is based on the bird’s natural instinct to imprint, or become attached to the first creature that nurtures it. Even before they hatched, the birds were exposed to the noise of the ultralight’s engine and recorded crane calls. So far, only humans dressed in crane suits have come into contact with the fledglings.

Sprague said the birds are not the only ones who are bonding.

“I get attached to them,” he said. “I spend every day of their lives with them.”

When Sprague first started working with the birds, they were fuzzy, cinnamon-colored chicks he could hold in one hand. Now they are covered with a mixture of down and feathers--both tawny in color--with some white feathers on their wings providing a glimpse of their adult coloring.

Sprague will travel with the chicks as they summer in Wisconsin at the Necedah National Wildlife Refuge and then serve on the ground crew as they make the six-week journey to their winter home in Florida’s Chassahowitzka National Wildlife Refuge. The birds are expected to return to Wisconsin on their own.

Before launching this experiment with the endangered birds, the Fish and Wildlife Service conducted a trial project with sandhill cranes, which are plentiful. This spring, 10 of the 11 cranes in the trial returned to their summer nesting grounds.

Along their migration route, the whooping cranes, ultralight and entourage will stay on public and private land. One of their hosts will be Dick Dana, who has turned cornfields into wetlands on his property in Baraboo Hills, Wis.

Dana, who hosted the sandhill crane migration as well, said being asked to help in the recovery of the whooping crane is like “being back in the ‘60s and being asked to go to Woodstock and given a backstage pass. It’s too fun for words.”

If this year is anything like last year, Dana will find it hard to stay home when the birds continue on their flight.

“It was a circus, and when it left, I wanted to go with it,” Dana said.

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The Fledgling Flyway

The Canada-to-Texas route is the only flyway being used by whooping cranes. A new program is trying to teach young birds to fly the route on the right, Wisconsin to Florida.

Source: U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service