March Madness for Whooping Cranes

UPDATED: Thursday, April 3   

As expected the eight “ultralight chicks” of 2013 took off for home – Wisconsin – Monday morning, leaving their wintering site at St. Mark’s National Wildlife Refuge in Florida. On its Facebook page on Tuesday, Operation Migration, (the group that taught the chicks the migration route last fall) reported observations of OM pilot Brooke Pennypacker: the young cranes took off as a group, and they had a tailwind. Later in the day there were reported roosting in southeastern Alabama, having covered 150 miles on their first day of migration. On Wednesday OM said this: “We received a couple of PTT hits for whooping crane #1-13 last evening that place her approximately 130 miles north of the previous stopover.” Four other cranes are fitted with the sensitive PTT monitors and it is hoped more location information will soon be forthcoming.

 

Monday, March 31

Yesterday was highly anticipated, weather-wise, here in northeast Wisconsin, and it didn’t disappoint. A walk in an urban woods was full of sensory gratification: bright sunshine, mild winds from the south, and open water. Slush and mud puddles dotted woodland paths; melting snow was everywhere else, and maybe most welcome of all was the almost-forgotten fresh air smell of everything in the natural world coming out of its dormant state. It was the kind of day, I ‘m sure, that will bring more whooping cranes home to the state.

After a long, deep freeze . . .

 

After a day like that, I’ll be surprised if we don’t learn this week that the 8 “ultralight chicks” of 2013 have taken to the air down in Florida, departing for good from their protected winter pensite at St. Marks’s NWR. There have been a mounting number of whooping crane sightings already reported in Wisconsin this month (see the websites or Facebook pages of the International Crane Foundation or Operation Migration), but the return of these youngest whooping cranes in the Eastern Migratory Population is still awaited.

. . . Wisconsin is thawing out fast.

 

 

And it’s always a big deal. Though it happens predictably year-after-year, there’s always something so satisfying and breathtaking, really, about the return of the year-old whooping cranes who have just learned the migration route the previous fall by flying it with the ultralights of Operation Migration. I touched on the fall trip of the Class of 2013 in my first post here at The Badger and the Whooping Crane, calling the guided-migration their “final exam.” If fall’s guided-migration is really their “final examine,” their unaided migration back to Wisconsin this spring is truly a Commencement Exercise – their graduation into the real world as genuinely wild beings.

International Crane Foundation photo of the whooping crane winter pen site in Florida; taken January 2007. The 8 young whooping cranes of 2013, that were led to Florida by the Operation Migration ultralights, spend their nights in a protected wet pen like this one, until – on their own – they soon begin their first migration northward, back to Wisconsin.

Until their flight back to Wisconsin, everything about their existence from hatching, to fledging, to fall migration, has been intensely managed by humans. (That would be mute, disguised humans, to be sure, so that the growing crane chicks, do not become imprinted on humans, or even comfortable near them.) Even once in Florida, where they are allowed to fly free after the momentous fall migration, they are still watched over by costumed-handlers, and coaxed into a netted enclosure ever night.

But one day soon, if they haven’t already, the young adult cranes of the Class of 2013, will rise into the moist gulf air with a new intention. They’ll set their course to the north and be gone. And they’ll be found back here in Wisconsin just days later. We’re waiting for them.

 

Birder Meets Whooping Cranes

“Striking, serene, graceful. Hungry. Nonchalant.” Those are the words that confirmed birder, Dale Bonk, used to describe whooping cranes.

I had asked Dale, a member of the Wisconsin Birding Facebook group, to suggest three words he’d use to describe the wild whooping cranes he’d just seen, and he gave me five. One could probably think of plenty more, he added.

Dale had spent an early November day observing and photographing a pair of whooping cranes in Dane County, and he was happy to share his strong impressions from the sighting. But maybe the best thing that sums up his experience are the first words that went through his mind that day. He shared, via email: “Wow! Holy Jebus! They’re there; they’re actually there! …And they’re not flying away. Let’s hope the camera works.”

Whooping Crane pair photographed by Dale Bonk in Dane County in November.

His camera worked just fine. He later admitted on Facebook that he had been “a little shutter happy” and had taken “something like 400 shots.”

About a week before Dale’s encounter, a number of other members of the Wisconsin Birding group had seen the pair and there was quite a bit of chatter about them on the Facebook page, including where to find them. As is the practice among birders, those reporting the sightings were as precise as possible about locations – it’s a courtesy to other birders who hope to see for themselves. It didn’t take long, however, before someone questioned if this was the right thing to do for birds that are members of an endangered species.

In fact, the Whooping Crane Eastern Partnership issues precise guidelines about observing cranes in the wild, and shortly after the Facebook discussion about this, the Wisconsin Birder page moderators published a request they had received from WCEP to restrict the location reporting to county-level-only. They’ve also included a link to use to report all sightings to the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service.

For Dale what makes whooping cranes so special is that “they were so close to extinction , and yet, somehow, humans managed to ‘save’ them. For nature lovers, having a ‘success’ story is a wonderful feeling.” Dale is a self-described “outdoorsy person” and always has been, “but I’ve only gotten into birding in the past year, and intensely with the camera and scope in the past 6 months.”

He selected 21 of the best among the many pictures he made of the whooping crane pair and published a Facebook album, to which he added: “This sighting makes me unbelievably happy. What gorgeous birds!”

A final note: The Badger and the Whooping Crane is grateful to Dale Bonk for the use of his images. Both photos clearly show the birds’ leg bands and identify the birds as members of the WCEP population. These bands lead to a wealth of information on each individual bird compiled by WCEP. Doesn’t that sound like good material for another post, another time?