Back to Blogging: A Personal Note from a Mother Hen

I’ve been missing for a while from The Badger and the Whooping Crane – virtually no new posts for waaaay too long. Now I’m back to blog, but think perhaps an explanation for the absence should be offered..

Of course I wanted to write about the spring migration back to Wisconsin made by at least 90 of our wild whoopers; and I certainly did not want to miss the nesting season, and the hatching of new chicks in the wild, that followed soon after! But I was busy elsewhere, focused like a laser on preparations that were being made for the marriage of my own youngest chick. I was fully distracted, you might say, being a mother hen.

Desperately Distracted by the Details

Instead of whooping crane posts, about the only writing I was doing was lists of wedding prep to-do’s:  lists of things to be printed, and things to be planted; things to be shopped for, calls to be made, appointments to be kept. And a list with no end of clean-up, fix-up, home improvement “musts.” There was a wedding party migrating our way, and they would need a place to roost. Of course, there was a full committee worrying over all these details, too, but when you are the mother hen, well . . . .

(Photo by Evan Fedorko)

Before we knew it the day was here, bringing proof that time and effort expended in the service of a worthy goal, is time well spent. On a perfectly gorgeous August afternoon, our chick and her mate became a pair, pledging their love and fidelity in a woodland glen, in the presence of a very large flock of happy friends and family.

Then this new couple, and the happy crowd with it, celebrated through the evening and into the night in a large, open, fairy-tale-like tent overlooking the prairie of a state historical park, a river in the distance. It was exactly the day this pair had wanted.

A Mission Accomplished, Another Restated

So, mission accomplished! And now, happily back to the 2-part mission I still believe The Badger and the Whooping Crane should encompass: first, helping to tell the tale, unique and unusual as it is, of Wisconsin’s re-introduced population of wild whooping cranes, and second, celebrating our state’s strong conservation ethic; its history of natural resource protection. It is Wisconsin’s natural gifts, after all, that sustain the whoopers, and every other living thing here, humans included.

What’s Next?  

Watch for the next post that will offer a review of the current status of our Eastern Migratory Population of  whooping cranes at the end of the Summer of 2016,  a summer that has been called “transitional” for this effort to reintroduce the whooping crane species to Eastern North America. A second post will include an update of each of the 18 whoopers of 2015 – all that entered the population, whether as Parent-reared, Direct Autumn release, Ultralight-trained, or wild hatched – where they migrated to, where they are now.