[Assam] Orchestrating the comeback of the whooping crane

[Dilip and Dil Deka]

This newspaper was my source of news in English when I lived overseas. Once in a while now I visit their website. This article should be of interest to some netters.
Dilip Deka
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Orchestrating the comeback of the whooping crane 
By Jon Mooallem

Friday, February 20, 2009 
People started gathering at the Lighthouse Missionary Baptist Church in southwestern Kentucky before sunrise. It was the first Friday in December, 23 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 5 Celsius) at dawn and nearly windless. Everyone was looking up.
Operation Migration's four ultralight planes floated into view over some oak and maple trees, then passed over the small white chapel. At 200 feet, or 60 meters, the first pilot, Chris Gullikson, was perfectly visible in the open cockpit. He was wearing his whooping-crane costume, a white hooded helmet and white gown that looked like a cross between a beekeeping suit and a Ku Klux Klan get-up.
Gullikson and the other pilots were going to pick up 14 juvenile whooping cranes that they were, little by little, leading south for the winter. Traditionally, and for many millenniums, cranes learned to migrate by following other cranes. But traditions have changed.
For the past eight years, Operation Migration has been one of several organizations collectively trying to bring whooping cranes back to the eastern part of the North American continent. The whooping crane is reclusive and headstrong - it demands a square mile, or two and a half square kilometers, around its nest to itself - and consequently was one of the first birds to suffer as humans crowded into their space.
Re-establishing the species presents a challenge: How can humans intervene to breed and teach the birds what they will need to survive without also wearing away those birds' natural apprehension of people? One way is to do it in disguise.
From the time Operation Migration's cranes hatch at the U.S. government's Patuxent Wildlife Research Center in Maryland, and for the rest of their lives, every effort is made to keep them from acclimating to humans or encountering even the slightest sign of them. Workers never speak around the cranes, and they always wear the same white costumes.
They use a small crane-head puppet slipped over one hand to teach the chicks how to peck and forage. Gradually, the cranes "imprint" on the costume, accepting whoever is wearing it as the dominant bird in their cohort.
The chicks are then shipped to the Necedah National Wildlife Refuge in Wisconsin for "flight training." Like many species, whooping cranes learn to migrate only by following their parents. So the ultralight and its costumed pilot are introduced as a proxy.
The journey from Wisconsin to Florida is 1,285 miles, or nearly 2,100 kilometers. Wild cranes can do it in as little as a week, swirling up to 8,000 or 10,000 feet on columns of rising air and coasting for miles. But the human-led migration takes longer: last year, it took more than three months.
After following the ultralights their first year, the cranes continue migrating back and forth on their own each spring and autumn. That very morning, in fact, graduates of the team's seven previous ultralight-led migrations - 73 cranes in all - were scattered up and down the eastern flyway, at various points on their passage to Florida. Also scattered up and down the flyway were biologists from Operation Migration's many partner organizations, tracking the radio signals emitted from those birds' leg bands.
And now that Operation Migration's current class of cranes was airborne, its crew would hit the road, too, chasing the migration to its next stop in two motor homes, two pickups towing campers, and two vans, one towing a 50-foot supply trailer with a spare aircraft.
All told, seven state and federal agencies and two nonprofits with an annual collective budget of $1.7 million in public and private funds were hard at work, fulfilling humankind's responsibility to a bird that we've defibrillated out of near-certain extinction. (Operation Migration, a nonprofit on an unforgiving $700,000 budget, gets almost no government money; the majority of its financing comes from individual donors.)
The whooping crane, David Wilcove, a Princeton ecologist, told me recently, "is just about the most charismatic endangered species in America." By 1941, only 21 wild ones remained. Today there are 381, enough to make it one of the most uplifting success stories in a field where the bar is admittedly sinking rather low.
The hum of the engines swelled into a buzz. Then the lead pilot, Chris Gullikson, reappeared in the sky, drawing a lopsided V of tremendous white shapes behind his wingtips. As the parade of birds and machines coasted over the chapel, people raised their binoculars and cameras to their faces and tilted back their heads.
Joe Duff, Operation Migration's co-founder, was a photographer in Toronto when, in 1993, he helped another ultralight hobbyist and artist named William Lishman - the first person to fly with birds - lead 18 Canada geese on a migration from Ontario to Virginia.
"The whole idea was to use this tech-nique for endangered species," Duff said. Soon the two men started practicing by costume-rearing nonendangered sandhill cranes and then migrating with them.
The nonprofit International Crane Foundation had been costume-rearing sandhills experimentally at the Necedah refuge in Wisconsin since a biologist named Rob Horwich devised the process there in 1985 as a tool for eventually reintroducing endangered crane species. Lishman and Duff honed a strict and effective protocol that allowed them to fly their sandhills outside the bubble of a refuge, and in 1998, Duff pre-sented their work to the International Whooping Crane Recovery Team, the partnership of Canadian and American biologists charged by the two governments with reviving the species.
"We were basically trying to ask the federal government to give us one of their most endangered species so we can dress up in a costume and lead it halfway across the country," Duff recalled. "With a puppet."
The whooping crane is the largest North American bird. It stands five feet tall and has a stiletto beak and a raspy call that carries for two or more miles. It nests in marshes and all but vanished as the wetlands running down the center of the continent were drained for agriculture in the 1800s. It was one of the original species listed under the Endangered Species Act in 1973, when only a single migratory population of about 50 birds remained.
Since then, staunch protection of its breeding grounds on the border of Alberta and the Northwest Territories and its wintering grounds on the Gulf Coast of Texas have allowed that lone, wild population to rebound. It is now up to 265 birds, an extraordinary turnaround but still not enough to give solid odds for the species' long-term survival.
So for 30 years, biologists have been trying to bolster that population by setting up a second, separate one. Operation Migration and its partners, known as the Whooping Crane Eastern Partnership, are the latest chapter in that effort.
There is a serious problem, however: The whooping-crane population that the partnership has toiled to build up in the eastern United States has shown virtually no ability to sustain itself so far. The birds are abandoning their nests on the Wisconsin refuge, leaving their eggs to be eaten. It is not clear why, but it may be that an infestation of black flies is harassing the birds, and they are just getting fed up and walking away.
Whooping cranes don't typically reproduce until they are 5 years old. But after seven years of guided migrations, Operation Migration's cranes have successfully fledged only one chick, and biologists are concerned.
Duff is confident the problem can be solved, whatever is causing it, and that someday - when new generations of birds start materializing in Wisconsin and are led south by their parents - Operation Migration's work won't be necessary anymore. "I do anticipate that it's going to work eventually, otherwise I wouldn't bother," he said. "But I don't think it's going to be as easy as we thought when we started."
As hard as it is to create cranes that will survive in the wild, making sure there is suitable wilderness to put them in may be harder. Globally, loss of habitat is the grimmest threat to endangered species, and it is no longer enough to simply seal off the habitat that is left. Those ecosystems also must be managed as assiduously as the animals themselves.
"A term that has come into use in the last couple of years is 'conservation-reliant species,"' said Kieran Suckling, executive director of the Center for Biological Diversity. "These are species that we can re-introduce successfully, but they'll forever require active management." They will last, in other words, as long as we keep rigging the world around them in their favor.
Even as the recovery team jump-starts a new population of whooping cranes in the East, threats are gathering around the longstanding population of wild birds. Water is being diverted from the river that feeds the birds' wintering grounds in Texas toward the ballooning San Antonio area. Ponds of toxic tailings from the tar-sands industry are multiplying near the northern end of the crane's migratory corridor, in Canada. And 40,000 wind turbines are projected to rise up along the route. (Collisions with power lines are already the leading known killer of the cranes during migration.)
John French, a U.S. Geological Survey biologist who oversees the whooping-crane research in Maryland, told me that the scientists overseeing the whooping-crane recovery are having a "sometimes very heated debate about how wild we actually want these birds we release to be. Is that the best thing for them? In my opinion, it may not be."
In other words, maybe the "Truman Show" existence that has been concocted for them is not actually doing them any favors. Maybe the most useful skill we could teach whooping cranes is how to coexist with people - if that is even possible.
Wilcove calls the whooping-crane recovery team "miracle workers," and the resurrection of the bird in North America, provisional as it still may be, is a heroic accomplishment.
"I feel like I'm doing something useful," Duff said. "I'm thinking pessimistically, but I'm trying to be positive," he went on. "Maybe you preserve a little bit of wetlands for something - and not just whooping cranes." Or, he added, "maybe whooping cranes will survive when we don't."