After months of training, on migration day, the excited birds burst from the pen, jumping and flapping their wings, and followed the lead ultralight into the air. As the aircraft nosed upward, the birds formed a chevron behind it.

Photo, top: Cranes in flight with ultralight escort, by Joseph Duff, Operation Migration

Photos of crane eating and groundwork in white suits by Heather Ray, Operation Migration

Spring 2002

Welcome Back, Whoopers
Whooping Cranes Relearn How to Migrate

Last fall, lucky birders in northeastern Illinois beheld a spectacle not seen in the state for more than a century: a southbound flock of whooping cranes. Through their binoculars, they also gaped at the unlikely lead bird: a bright yellow, triangular-winged, three-wheeled flying machine piloted by a billowing white phantom.

Welcome back to Chicago Wilderness, Grus americana.

The birds were migrating from Wisconsin to Florida, led by ultralight aircraft and followed by a ground crew of more than a dozen biologists, wildlife officials, veterinarians, mechanics and other assistants. The journey marked the beginning of the final phase of a long-term U.S./Canadian recovery plan for the species, establishing a new migratory population of the endangered birds in the whoopers’ historic range.

Whooping cranes evolved with the North American landscape. During the Pleistocene, when glaciers alternately iced and flooded the northern half of the continent, whoopers colonized newly created wetlands. Perhaps 15,000 whooping cranes lived in small populations scattered across what is now the United States and Canada. In the eastern half of the continent, breeding was concentrated in the prairie marshes of the Midwest. The birds that nested in Chicago Wilderness likely followed the eastern migratory route still used by sandhill cranes.

As European settlers moved west, converting wetlands to farmlands, whooper numbers plummeted. The last recorded whooper nest in Illinois was in 1880, and the last documented sighting of local cranes was in 1891. Since then, there have been only rare sightings in Illinois of off-course migrants from the surviving wild population that breeds in Canada and winters on the Texas coast. Today, whoopers are still the rarest of 15 crane species, with fewer than 400 birds, about one-third of them in captive-breeding centers.

The reintroduction of migratory whooping cranes to Wisconsin’s wetlands is the work of the Whooping Crane Eastern Partnership, which includes international, federal, and state wildlife agencies, and U.S. and Canadian conservation organizations. The project requires birds, ample wetlands, people, planes and pertinacity. It costs $1.3 million a year, more than half of it raised from private donors.

The first group of whooper chicks destined for reintroduction came from the captive flock at the U.S. Geological Survey’s Patuxent Wildlife Research Center in Maryland. In coming years, the International Crane Foundation (ICF) in Wisconsin, and the Calgary Zoo in Alberta, Canada, will also contribute birds to the project.

During their five-month conditioning program, the birds never saw or heard a human. Everyone who tended or trained the birds wore a head-to-boot baggy white costume that the birds learned to follow, as they would a parent. As hatchlings, the birds were exposed to adult whoopers and look-alike props to instill their "craneness." Even before they hatched, the chicks heard a recorded lullaby of a whooper parent’s brood call, ambient wetlands sounds — and an ultralight engine.

The ultralight is the other parental figure in the cranes’ lives — the one from which they’ll learn the migratory route. At about a week, the chicks learned to trot after the aircraft as Dan Sprague, a biologist and their trainer at Patuxent, taxied around their pen, broadcasting a whooper contact call from the plane’s sound system and dispensing mealworms from a life-sized, crane-faced puppet dubbed Robo-Crane.

At seven weeks, before they fledged, the birds were moved to the Necedah National Wildlife Refuge in central Wisconsin. "You have to show them where you want them to nest," said Joan Guilfoyle of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS), explaining the critical importance of their imprinting on the refuge landscape from the air. "That’s the land you want them to know in their heads as their home."

Many factors went into selecting a site for the whooper training camp and future nesting grounds. "The recovery team was searching for a place where whoopers used to breed that still has big wetlands and that is far away from the corridor of the population that goes to Texas," said George Archibald, ICF chairman and a member of the International Whooping Crane Recovery Team.

Biologists do not want the two groups mixing for genetic and health reasons, he explained. But the recovery team did want to locate the whoopers within the range of the eastern sandhill crane population, which nests in prairie marshes of Minnesota, Wisconsin, and northeastern Illinois, and migrates to Florida. The whoopers would likely flock with the sandhills on migration, finding security and good roosts, Archibald said.

The Necedah area offers 50,000 acres of prime whooper habitat on federal and state lands. Equally important, the community enthusiastically supports the project.

At the refuge, Sprague was joined by Operation Migration pilots Bill Lishman, Joe Duff and Deke Clark. Lishman and Duff pioneered the technique of leading migratory birds with slow-flying ultralights. "Whooping cranes are soaring birds," Duff explained. "In the wild, they would take off in mid-morning, fly with the thermals and climb up to 6,000 feet. They can fly like that for eight hours a day without expending much energy. We can’t do that with the ultralights, so these birds learn to fly off the wake created by the aircraft." But that only works when the air is calm and the ultralight is steady. If the air becomes turbulent, the birds have to flap fly, which tires them quickly. To avoid that, they flew early in the morning — or tried to.

The migration started October 17 as the ultralights led eight birds out of the refuge. Headwinds and storms slowed their progress through Wisconsin. On October 24, a fierce storm in the middle of the night tipped the cranes’ pen, and one bird flew off. It was found dead the next morning under a power line, the most common cause of death for cranes. Another bird wouldn’t follow the plane and rode in a van for the rest of the migration. The birds finally left Wisconsin and rode a tailwind 98 miles to DeKalb County, Ill., on October 27. Two days later, they made the leg to Kankakee County.

Nearly all of the arranged stops were on private lands, mostly farms, that had concealed areas for the birds and grass landing strips for the ultralights. The locations of the properties were kept secret and landowners were identified by first name only. Steve, a soybean farmer and pilot himself, was recruited in 2001, when Lishman landed, solo, on the farm runway. "He asked if it would be okay to land some birds here," the farmer said. "It kind of caught me by surprise." But Steve readily agreed. The three ultralights, along with the Cessna 182 used to fly top cover, were housed conveniently in Steve’s hangar-sized metal shed while the migration team’s campers were parked nearby.

Every morning Duff, Lishman and Clark rose at 5:30 to check the weather and determine if the birds could make it to the next stop, usually 60 to 90 minutes away. "That’s exactly the way the birds do it in the wild," Duff noted. "They wait until the weather is right and then they go." In Kankakee, headwinds from the south kept them grounded for six days. But on November 3, the predawn air was calm. As the sun rose, the planes were rolled out of the shed and checked. Around 6:30, the aircraft taxied toward the cranes’ night pen, concealed in a low area a quarter-mile away.

Costumed handlers threw open the pen doors as the ultralights taxied by, broadcasting a recorded "keep together" call. The excited birds burst from the pen, jumping and flapping their wings, and followed the lead ultralight into the air. As the aircraft nosed upward, the birds formed a chevron behind it. The strange flock, joined by Clark and Lishman, headed southeast toward Indiana. With a slight tailwind, the birds flew a record 2 hours and 9 minutes, covering 91.4 miles before landing in Boone County, Indiana.

The migration, which continued through Indiana, Kentucky, Tennessee, Georgia and Florida, took 48 days — 23 of them spent on the ground waiting out poor flying conditions. Six birds swooped into Chassahowitzka National Wildlife Refuge on Florida’s Gulf coast, on December 3. (The seventh bird arrived by van.) At 1,224 miles, this was the longest ultralight-led migration with an endangered species.

Biologists from ICF and USFWS are monitoring the birds all winter as they acclimate to life in the wild. If all goes well, in April the cranes will get the ancient urge — called migratory restlessness — to head north on their own. Biologists will be able to track their movements using radio and satellite transmitters attached on leg bands. Archibald estimates it will take the birds a week to 10 days to reach central Wisconsin. Riding the thermals that hindered the ultralights, the birds can coast north on the prevailing winds.

Doug Stotz, a conservation biologist and ornithologist at the Field Museum, predicted that the whoopers will link up with northbound sandhills, which stop at Jasper-Pulaski State Park in Indiana, then swing west of Chicago and head into Wisconsin. The whoopers could land in any of the wetlands in the western suburbs, he said, "but it’s likely, if they’re going to be seen, they’ll be seen flying overhead. In spring, on a day when you’ve got good southerly winds, there are thousands of cranes in the air. Look for some white ones!"

The likelihood of spotting whoopers among the gray sandhills will get better with time. The Whooping Crane Eastern Partnership will introduce birds for four more years by ultralight-led migration or, possibly, by placing young ones with experienced flocks. The long-term recovery goal is to have a self-sustaining migratory flock of 125 birds, including 25 breeding pairs, in Wisconsin by 2020. "If we can pull this off," said Guilfoyle of USFWS, "we’ll really have accomplished something."

For crane updates and an account of the migration, go to www.operationmigration.org. For a map tracking the birds’ spring migration, go to www.bringbackthecranes.org.