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Whooping Crane Returns to the Wild

Dow and Audubon Institute Helping Release Cranes into Southern Louisiana

Whooping cranes haven’t waded through the waters of marshy Southern Louisiana since the 1930s. Dr. Betsy Dresser and her colleagues at Audubon Nature Institute in New Orleans expect to change that this year.

After conducting biological surveys, the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service have determined that White Lake, a marshland southwest of Lafayette, is the ideal location to establish a new flock of whooping cranes in 2011.

If successful, this will be one of the two self-sustaining flocks experts hope to establish in the coming years. Moreover, it will be just one more step in a sixty-year conservation effort to save the ndangered bird.

A call only a mother could love

The whooping crane’s penetrating call isn’t melodic or tranquil. It’s more like the uneven honking of a 1914 Model T. However you describe it, this namesake call of the whooping crane is the muse that keeps thousands of men and women across North America working to save the species. “There’s no mistaking the call of a whooping crane,” said Dr. Dresser, Audubon’s Senior Vice President of Research and director of Audubon’s Center for Research of Endangered Species, a leading organization in the effort to reintroduce the bird to Southeastern United States. “It’s a distinguishing characteristic of the bird that many of us have come to appreciate.”

In fact, everything about the whooping crane is distinctive. The tallest of all North American birds, the crane stands nearly five feet and boasts a wingspan of more than seven feet. They have white bodies with black wing tips, black bills, long black legs, and are topped by red crowns. Graceful as they meander through marshes in search of minnows or clams and impressive in their migratory flight, whooping cranes are the rarest of 15 types of cranes.

On the brink of extinction

Indigenous to North America, the whooping crane barely survived the twentieth century. In the mid-1880s 1,400 cranes migrated as far as 2,400 miles between Canada and the upper Midwest down to the Texas Gulf Coast and across the Southeastern U.S. each year, breeding in the north during the summer and migrating south each fall.

By the 1940s, less than 20 birds made the annual journey. Habitat destruction in marshy areas, shooting and well-intentioned but misguided displacement activities all converged to nearly destroy the species. The crane was on the brink of extinction.

Over the last sixty years, federal and state agencies, nonprofit organizations and countless individuals have worked to help bring back a healthy and thriving whooping crane population. Yet still today only about 570 birds exist, 400 of them living among three wild populations and the remaining in 11 captive populations.

• One of the wild populations winters in the coastal Texas marshes near Arkansas and summers at Wood Buffalo National Park in Calgary. This is the only remnant of the wild population.
• A population of about 20 birds has been re-introduced into central Florida. It does not migrate. 
• In 2001 the Whooping Crane Eastern Partnership (WCEP), a group of non-profit organizations and government agencies, re-introduced a population that summers in Wisconsin and migrates to Florida for the winter. This flock receives great fanfare in the media because its youngest birds are guided each year from Wisconsin to Florida by an ultra-light aircraft in a program aptly named Operation Migration.

The WCEP aims to establish two additional self-sustaining wild populations in the coming years, one being in White Lake, Louisiana.

Audubon Nature Institute plays pivotal role

“It takes a village to raise a crane,” said Audubon’s Crane Coordinator Megan Lauber-Savoie, borrowing from the familiar African proverb to describe the network of agencies and organizations involved in whooping crane conservation. “We’re glad to have a role in this effort, to be one of the key groups working to bring the whooping crane back to the Southeastern U.S.”

In 2004 Audubon Nature Institute was selected by the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service (a founding member of the WCEP) to help increase the captive whooper population and to provide fertilized eggs for inclusion in Operation Migration. The Institute is one of the 11 organizations managing a captive population of cranes today.

Audubon Nature Institute was selected in large part because its scientists, veterinarians and animal managers are pioneers in sophisticated reproductive techniques with endangered species. The organization boasts many “firsts” in animal reproduction, including the first breeding of the whooping crane in captivity in the 1950s.

“Our involvement with the whooping crane goes back to the 1950s with that first successful reproduction effort. The crane was emblematic of our Institute for many years because of that,” Dr. Dresser said. “Since then, our ability to pioneer new reproductive techniques has really taken off, especially in the last twenty years.”

In recent years, the Institute has successfully cloned African wild cats, which naturally bred to produce healthy offspring. Audubon’s Mississippi sandhill crane breeding program has produced as many as 20 chicks each year since 1995 through artificial insemination and costume-rearing (a process where people dress in crane costumes to care for chicks). In addition, in 2007 and 2008 the program produced the first and second Mississippi sandhill crane chicks from cryobanked frozen-then-thawed semen, leading to the restoration of the subspecies. It was the development of this protocol in particular that best prepared the Audubon Institute to be a key player in the conservation of the whooping crane.

Success breeds success, so to speak, and in 2008 Audubon Nature Institute unveiled its newest research arm, the Whooping Crane Breeding Facility. Funded in part through a $1.2 million grant from the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, the facility expanded the Institute’s ability to produce whooping crane offspring. The facility at Audubon Center for Research of Endangered Species is home to the Audubon Nature Institute Whooping Crane Recovery Program, presented by The Dow Chemical Company. Audubon to date has provided 14 fertilized eggs to the Operation Migration program. The program currently has two breeding pairs of birds, and expects to expand that number to 10 pairs.

The Audubon Nature Institute Whooping Crane Recovery Program, presented by Dow Chemical, has established the following goals:

• Contribute to sustaining the national captive population of breeding whooping cranes
• Pioneer a process for capturing and storing whooping crane DNA (modeled after the success of the Mississippi Sandhill crane)
• Produce 11 offspring a year for genetically viable pairings (in small populations, it’s particularly important to manage the breeding pairings to ensure the healthiest gene pool for the overall population)

”We are honored by Dow’s support of this important conservation initiative, “ said Laurie Conkerton, Audubon’s Senior Vice President for Development. Dow’s partnership will support innovative approaches to bringing a native species back to Louisiana.”

Crane a sign of hope

Eighty years after the last whooping cranes lived in the wild in Louisiana, they will return to White Lake this year. The Audubon Nature Institute and four other breeding programs together expect to release more 300 juvenile cranes over the next 15 years.

But signs of hope often start small. This year, experts expect to release ten birds, including one Audubon egg. Conkerton sees this as a journey not unlike that taken by the people of Louisiana. “The whooping crane is a sign of hope,” concluded Conkerton. “They’re a lot like the people of Louisiana. They’ve been dealt some harsh blows, but they’re resilient and they’re making a great comeback.”