Rare whooping cranes fly again
A year after pandemic precautions all but halted work to raise the world’s most endangered cranes for release into the wild, the efforts are back in gear.
Fourteen long-legged, fuzzy brown whooping crane chicks — one more than in 2019 — are following their parents or costumed surrogates in facilities from New Orleans to Calgary.
“We are thrilled to have bounced back in the wake of the pandemic,” said Richard Dunn, assistant curator of the Freeport-McMoRan Audubon Species Survival Center in New Orleans.
Adult whooping cranes are white with black wingtips and red caps, and, at five feet high, are the tallest birds in North America. Only about 800 exist, all descendants of about 15 that survived hunters and habitat loss in a flock that migrates between Texas and Alberta.
Last year, zoos and other places where the endangered birds are bred had to cut staff and reduce or eliminate use of artificial insemination, which requires close work by two or three people, and of having people in shape-disguising costumes raise chicks.
“One chick hatched out at the Calgary Zoo,” Dunn said. “And it had to stay in Calgary because they couldn’t cross the border” to get it into either of two U.S.-only flocks.
Both a flock based in southwest Louisiana and one taught to migrate between Wisconsin and Florida by following ultralight aircraft were created in hopes of mitigating disaster should anything happen to the original border-crossing flock, now about 500 strong. The original flock is the only one that can survive without human assistance to increase its numbers.
Seven chicks hatched this year at the Species Survival Center.
Aurora, a male produced there by artificial insemination, is being brought up by his mother and “stepfather,” though his mother is temporarily hospitalized after chipping her beak on their enclosure’s chainlink fence.
The other six — five hatched from eggs taken from the wild in Wisconsin and one from an egg bred at the International Crane Foundation in Baraboo, Wis. — are being raised by staffers.
When teaching the chicks to hunt and other crane behaviours, they dress in baggy costumes with the neck of a crane-head hand puppet holding in one loose, black-tipped “wing.” The puppet demonstrates how to pick up insects from the ground, then passes the tasty morsels to a chick.
One of Louisiana’s Texas-nesting pairs also hatched a chick last year — the first documented since the early 1900s, Zimorski said. Texas is the original flock’s winter home but those birds nest in Alberta’s Wood Buffalo National Park.
This year’s Texas survivor was hatched by first-time parents and is still very young, Zimorski wrote in an email. “It has a long ways to go!” she said.