Generations and Other True Stories (9 page)

Although whoopers are wary birds and not easily hunted, by 1900 they were in danger of disappearing from the earth. By 1941 only twenty-two were left. Six were in a Louisiana flock that would be extinct by 1949. The other sixteen were wintering on the Blackjack Peninsula, a maze of marshes and bays in Aransas, Calhoun, and Refugio counties on the Texas coast.

On the last day of 1937, while eighteen whoopers were wintering there, Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt had signed Executive Order No. 77841 declaring 47,215 acres of the peninsula a wildlife preserve. His decree gave the whoopers a chance to struggle back from the edge of extinction.

But man's efforts to aid the recovery of the species was hindered by the fact that the location of the whoopers' breeding ground was their secret. When the few remaining cranes lifted off from Aransas each spring and headed north, no one knew where they went.

In 1945, Canadian pilots and biologists began crisscrossing the prairie provinces where cranes had been sighted, scanning the wilderness for signs of the mysterious last remaining nesting ground of the species. In 1952, biologist Robert Smith spotted two whoopers on the ground, thirty miles apart, near the Great Slave Lake in the Northwest Territories, but subsequent flights to confirm his sighting failed.

Then, on June 30, 1954, pilot Don Landells and forester G.M. Wilson were flying over the same area in a helicopter, checking on a wild fire that was burning in the wilderness below. Along the Sass River, in the wildest, most remote region of the Wood Buffalo National Park, they spotted adult whooping cranes and their new chicks, browsing in the marshes. The secret breeding ground had been discovered.

“Wood Buffalo had been a national park since 1922,” Brian Johns says. “That part of it also turned out to be the whooping cranes' nesting ground was pure coincidence.”

Since the discovery, biologists have been able to study the breeding and feeding habits of the birds in their secret hideaway, searching for ways that science may help the whoopers to multiply themselves off the Endangered Species List someday.

Mr. Johns, who now heads the whooping crane program for the Canadian Wildlife Service, has been a member of the crews that helicopter into the nesting ground each summer to catch the fledgling chicks and place identification bands on their legs, so their lives can be chronicled by the biologists.

“The young birds can't fly yet, and we chase them around the marshes on foot,” he says, “slogging through mud up to the knees, getting tangled in the growth, falling down. When we capture one, we weigh it and put the bands on its legs. Thereafter, when we spot them from a distance, we can tell who they are, where they were banded and the nest sites they came from.”

Whooping cranes mate for life. Each couple stakes out its own territory, to which it returns each spring to build a new nest of bullrushes, sedges, and cattails. The breeding pairs migrate from Texas first, in late April and early May. By the middle of May, all the nests that are going to be built have been, and each hen has laid her usual two eggs. Only then do the younger, nonbreeding birds—those under four years old—begin arriving at the grounds.

Except in May, when biologists fly into the marshes to test the hatchibility of the eggs that have been laid, the birds spend the summer in peace. “Very few people who have come to the park have ever seen the cranes,” says Dave Milne, a Wood Buffalo park warden. “In fact, a lot of people who work for the park have never seen the cranes.” Except for the small craft used by the biologists in their work, airplanes must be at least two thousand feet up when they fly over the nesting ground.

“Nearly all the eggs hatch,” Mr. Johns says. “But the survivability of the chicks is what will determine whether we're going to have twenty young or five young from one year to the next. More survive in years when water in the wetlands is high. It's harder for wolves and bears to reach them then.”

The biologists have learned that although both eggs in a nest usually hatch, most crane parents don't want to rear twins. The second hatchling rarely survives. So in recent years biologists have taken one egg from each of the nests and tried to hatch them in captivity, to ensure the survival of the species if catastrophe should happen to the Aransas flock.

A flock of eight whooping cranes now spends its summers in Idaho and its winters in New Mexico. It was created by placing whooping crane eggs in the nests of sandhill cranes. The sandhill cranes hatched them and took care of the chicks, but the whoopers have never paired off and bred. They even have a different call than the Aransas cranes. “Maybe because they were raised by sandhill cranes,” says Mr. Johns. “There's some behavioral problem there.”

Also, last winter thirteen young birds were released in Florida in an effort to restore a nonmigratory whooping crane flock that once lived there. So far, bobcats have eaten eight of them. If the remaining six survive, they won't reach breeding age for three more years.

For the whooping crane to be upgraded from “endangered” to “threatened” status would require that at least forty breeding pairs show up at Wood Buffalo for ten consecutive years, and that there be two other breeding flocks of twenty-five pairs or more.

So far, all efforts to create those new breeding flocks have failed. “All our experiments are fraught with difficulty,” says Mr. Johns.

But the wild flock is doing well. More than forty breeding pairs have shown up at Wood Buffalo two years in a row now, and in recent years the whoopers have experienced a population explosion. Twenty years ago, there were only forty-nine cranes in the Wood Buffalo flock. Throughout the 1960s and ‘70s their numbers hovered in the forty-to-sixty range, seemingly unable to grow further.

“It hung there for a long time, and then they got over that hump,” says Tom Stehn, the refuge biologist at Aransas. “For years, it was cause for celebration if the flock increased two or three birds. Now they're in kind of a geometric progression.” Between 1981 and 1990, the size of the flock doubled, from 71 to 146. With good luck in Canada, Mr. Stehn believes the wild flock soon could produce as many as twenty-five chicks in a single year.

“The problem now is we've been getting pretty high mortality,” he says. “Over the last three or four years we've been losing like ten birds a year that leave here in the spring and then don't show up again in the fall.”

What happens to them? A network of observers has been set up throughout the entire migration corridor. Biologists check every report of a whooping crane sighting to ascertain whether the birds are really cranes and whether anything in the area might harm them. They notify hunters in the area to take extra care not to shoot them. Yet the birds disappear, and nobody knows why.

But, Mr. Stehn says, there are clues.

In 1982, when there were only seventy-three whoopers in the world, Mr. Stehn was part of a team tracking a family of three cranes from Wood Buffalo to Aransas. During the summer, Canadian biologists had captured chicks and attached lightweight solar-powered radio transmitters to their legs. The trackers chose one crane family to be followed in the air by a pilot and an observer in a small plane with antennae mounted on the wings. They could pick up the chick's signals at a distance of fifty miles. When the birds would land for the night, the air crew would radio their location to biologists on the ground, who would find the group and observe them until they took off again the next day.

“We knew where their general flight path was, but we didn't know much about their behavior during migration,” Mr. Stehn says. “What did they eat? Did they have traditional stopping places that we might need to protect, or did they stop at random? What kind of dangers did they encounter on the trip?”

The birds lifted off from Wood Buffalo, flew 175 miles the first day, landed and rested for five days, then took off again. That evening, they landed in Saskatchewan, where they hung out in Midnight Lake for eighteen days, making short flights each day to feed in the farm fields.

Then, on a routine feeding flight, the chick they were following crashed into a power line. The tracking crew took the injured bird to a veterinarian, but it died six days later.

So the crew switched its attention to the radio signal of another chick that was feeding in the area. This chick and her parents made it safely to Aransas.

The following year, the trackers decided to follow the same bird, now seventeen months old, on her first solo flight from Canada to Texas. Somewhere along the way, the crew lost her signal. Days later, they found her dead under a power line near Waco.

“We think the No. 1 cause of loss of whooping cranes is collisions with power lines,” Mr. Stehn says. “They just plumb don't see the lines, either toward dusk or in a snow storm or fog. It happens when they're stopping for the night during their migration, and when they're flying to and from the fields where they feed.”

The cranes' other great danger is still people with guns.

In 1918, a farmer named Alcie Daigle helped the Louisiana flock—one of only two flocks left at the time—along the road to extinction by shooting twelve whoopers he found feeding on rice that had fallen from his threshing machine. So far as the biologists know, such mass avicides don't occur anymore, but whooping cranes are still being shot, and no one knows how many.

“I used to think that shooting was a rare exception,” Mr. Stehn says, “but now I don't know. We have fewer and fewer wetlands, and as the hunting pressure concentrates, whooping cranes are bound to be shot by mistake. A lot of those guys aren't real hunters. They're just shooting at whatever flies over. And when they discover they've killed a whooper, they hide the evidence.”

Most of the whooping cranes that have been shot—at least of those reported to authorities—were killed in Texas, including the two most recent.

In January 1989, Mario Max Yzaguirre, a Houston lawyer hunting on San Jose Island, just outside the Aransas refuge, shot a four-year-old whooping crane hen. He said he thought she was a snow goose, a bird less than a third the size of a whooper.

The crane had just arrived from Canada with her first chick. Had she lived, she might have produced ten to fifteen more chicks during her breeding years.

A federal judge fined Mr. Yzaguirre $15,000 and ordered him to pay the state $6,480 restitution for the dead crane.

And in 1991, Billy Dale Inman of Marble Falls, Texas, was sentenced to sixty days in federal prison and two hundred hours of community service, fined $15,000 and ordered to pay $8,100 in restitution for killing a whooping crane on a dare.

Curtis Collier Sayers, who was fishing on the Colorado River with Mr. Inman and dared his companion to shoot the bird, was sentenced to twenty days in jail, three years probation, a two thousand dollar fine and two hundred hours of community service for his part in the crime.

They had buried the dead whooping crane, but Raena Wharton, an English teacher at San Saba High School, had witnessed their deed. Ms. Wharton said she was standing outside her home admiring the cranes flying over when she heard the shot and watched the bird fall. She went inside and called a game warden, then saddled her horse and rode down to the river to keep an eye on the men. She saw them bury the bird.

“I couldn't believe someone could shoot anything so beautiful,” she told the court.

Whoopers and their relatives always have fascinated people. A thousand years before Christ, Homer wrote of cranes in the
Iliad
, and Jeremiah spoke of them in his prophecy. Theophrastus says sailors used them to predict the weather. When cranes headed out to sea, then turned back, it was unsafe to leave port, but when they departed and didn't return, it was a sign of fair weather.

The Greeks and Romans thought cranes to be wise, intelligent, sociable beings, capable of helping tired or wounded companions, and willing to let smaller birds ride on their backs when they became weary.

The call of the whooping crane, which gives it its name, is made by a large, long windpipe that curls like a French horn in the whooper's chest. It can be heard for two miles. About one hundred years ago, a sportsman named Theodore S. Van Dyke described it as “the blast of a silver horn.”

He was writing of his observations of a flock of whooping cranes that were strutting about, calling to each other. Then they took to the air. “It seemed wicked,” he wrote, “to spoil anything so rare and so beautiful as that sight.” But he shot two of them anyway, causing them to “relax hold on the warm sunlight.”

Though smaller in number now, the whoopers continue to fascinate all who see them, and on the Texas coast their arrival is awaited with high anticipation. “Once you spot a whooping crane, you know it couldn't be anything else,” says Ted Appell, captain of the
Skimmer
, one of four boats that run whooping crane tours out of Fulton and Rockport, just down the coast from the refuge. “There's no other bird like them.”

Captain Appell had the
Skimmer
built “especially for the birdies,” he says, with a shallow draft so he can work it into the waters of the back bays. It carries eight thousand birders a year from all over the world to see the magnificent white birds, North America's largest, four and a half feet tall, wading in the shallow water, warning interlopers away, teaching their young all the ancient crane ways.

“I've been looking at them for twenty-something years,” Captain Appell says, “and when a whooping crane flies across the bow of my boat, I still get cold chills right up my back, just like I did the first day I saw that beautiful bird.”

In 1972, when he started working on a birding tour boat, the whooping cranes numbered in the twenties. Over the years, he has watched the flock grow. An avid birder himself, he has formed attachments to certain birds he has watched from year to year.

One of his favorites was the young hen killed by Mr. Yzaguirre on San Jose Island.