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Summer
2002
Whoopers
Return
A Sleepover in Chicago Wilderness
By Karen Furnweger
This spring, many Chicago WILDERNESS
readers were glued to their computers, scanning the Internet
to find out what would happen to our whooping cranes. Last
fall the birds were led from Wisconsin to their Florida
refuge by ultralight aircraft. Throughout the winter, biologists
monitored the birds, providing a fenced roosting area, supplemental
food and, when bobcats killed two cranes, predator removal.
This spring, the five surviving birds
were on their own. No one quite knew what would happen.
Would they migrate on their own? If so, where would they
go? They took off on April 9, the exact day that another
whooper population, wintering nearly a thousand miles away
in Texas, left for their breeding grounds in Canada.
Steve Kiecker, an avid birder who
lives in Berwyn, never thought he'd check the box next to
"Crane, whooping" on the life list at the back of
his bird guide. That was until the afternoon of April 16,
when a flock of four whoopers glided over his backyard at
about two hundred feet. Kiecker was awestruck.
The cranes were landing at a Cook
County forest preserve after eight hours of riding thermals
from central Indiana. They spent two nights there, resting
in ponds that provided them isolation, food and security
from predators.
The whoopers' stay marks the first spring
in more than a century that this endangered species has
landed in Chicago Wilderness. Credit their return to efforts
by the Whooping Crane Eastern Partnership to re-establish
a migratory population of whoopers in eastern North America
using captive-reared birds (See Welcome
Back, Whoopers, CW, Spring 2002).
Aside from Kiecker's sighting, the five-foot
birds apparently went undetected "right in the middle
of metro Chicago," said Richard Urbanek, the U.S. Fish
and Wildlife Service biologist who radio-tracked them during
the eleven-day, 1,175-mile journey from Chassahowitzka National
Wildlife Refuge in Florida to their summer home in central
Wisconsin near the Necedah National Wildlife Refuge.
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The cranes slumbered two nights in a forest preserve
near O'Hare Airport. Photo by Richard Urbanek,
courtesy of USFWS on behalf of ICF.
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Six days into the migration, a female,
harassed by the more dominant birds of the group, headed
off on her own course. But both groups continued toward
Wisconsin. When the flock of four reached Chicago Wilderness,
the migration took an interesting turn, literally. The fall
migration — led by the ultralight — had stayed
west of Chicago airspace, so the birds weren't expecting
Lake Michigan in their northbound path.
"It was a surprise," Urbanek
said. "They had never seen a lake that big. Norm-ally
they won't cross large bodies of open water, so they had
to decide what to do." The birds circled at a thousand
feet over the Indiana dunes for two hours, then headed west,
crossing the Indiana-Illinois border at 4:15 p.m. and landing
northwest of Chicago a little after 5 p.m. After a day of
undisturbed "loafing," Urbanek said, the four
birds took off early April 18. Buffeted by spring storms,
they arrived at the Necedah refuge the next evening. The
fifth bird, which didn't stop in Illinois, tarried in southern
Wisconsin before landing at the refuge May 3.
The original eastern migratory population
of whooping cranes bred from Minnesota to Illinois and
wintered on the Atlantic coast. Population estimates range
from seven hundred to fourteen hundred birds in the mid-nineteenth
century, when settlers already were draining the birds'
wetland habitats for farms. Whoopers were extirpated in
Illinois by 1892.
This year, up to eighteen hand-reared
chicks will be trained at Necedah to make the fall migration
behind ultralights. The cranes now returning to Necedah
have "graduated" into wild birds and will have
no contact with the new chicks or their human trainers.
Ultralight-led introductions will continue at least through
2005. The goal of the project is to establish a self-sustaining
population of 125 birds with at least 25 breeding pairs.
In the migration seasons to come, whooping
cranes may well regard Chicago Wilderness as a welcoming
stopover. Arriving in flocks of four or five, they may even
become familiar sights. But for Steve Kiecker and others
who witness their flight, whoopers will never be anything
less than awe-inspiring.
For more information on the spring migration
go to www.operationmigration.org;
www.bringbackthecranes.org;
and www.savingcranes.org.
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