Led by Aircraft, Cranes Reach Finish Line of Migration

Cameron Walker
for National Geographic News

December 19, 2006

This morning a group of endangered whooping cranes led by ultralight planes completed their 1,234-mile (1,985-kilometer) winged migration from Wisconsin to central Florida (map of the route).

"They've arrived," said Liz Condie, spokesperson for Operation Migration, a nonprofit group based in Port Perry, Ontario, Canada (Canada map).

"It's all over but the crying."

Seventeen of the 18 birds in the migration flew over a crowd of hundreds at Florida's Dunnellon/Marion County Airport before reaching their final destination of Halpata Tastanaki Preserve.

On Monday's flight four chicks dropped out of the day's journey. Three were found yesterday, but one crane is still missing.

This is the sixth year that captive-reared whooping cranes have learned their migration route with the help of pilots and ground crew.

Operation Migration's work is part of the Whooping Crane Eastern Partnership, a team of U.S. and Canadian government agencies and private groups. Through captive breeding, guided migration, tracking, and other research, the partnership is trying create a new migratory, eastern-U.S. population of the species.

The whooping crane is listed as endangered on the U.S. government's endangered species list.

Long-Haul Flight

This year's migration took the group 76 days, the longest in the ultralight-led migration's six-year history.

The 18 cranes and four ultralights took off from Wisconsin's Necedah National Wildlife Refuge on October 5—the earliest departure for this migration since the annual Operation Migration trips began in 2001.

During the migration, bad weather often kept the cranes grounded. In late November the group spent nine consecutive days earthbound in Tennessee, waiting for the winds to allow the birds to cross the route's most significant hurdle, a 2,800-foot-tall (850-meter-tall) section of the Cumberland Plateau.

Condie described the cranes' progress as "slow but sure."

The group made up for delays with several longer-distance flights of as much as 107 miles (172 kilometers) in a day.

Yet on December 7, day 64 of the journey, Operation Migration co-founder Joe Duff sounded disheartened.

That morning in Pike County, the second stopover in Georgia, the four pilots had attempted to fly with the birds but were forced back by bumpy air.

While the pilots are generally comfortable flying in such conditions, it's different when you have 18 endangered cranes depending on you, Duff said.

"What we're risking is all that we've put into it so far. It's a lot of pressure," he said. "It's a great adventure, but it's not fun."

Pilots have to watch the weather to keep birds following the planes.

When cranes migrate on their own, they often coast on updrafts to travel long distances with little effort. Behind the ultralights, however, birds must flap their wings to stay aloft—expending more energy and limiting the cranes to relatively short distances each day.

Pilots fly in the morning, when the air is usually calmer. This helps prevent cranes from soaring away on thermals—rising bodies of warm air—and getting lost.

After whooping cranes complete a migration with ultralights, the birds can later replicate the journey using their much swifter natural technique.

Last month a crane that Operation Migration had trained in 2005 made the journey from Wisconsin to Florida in five days.

Milestone

Now researchers, pilots, and crane enthusiasts have found that these crane students can become teachers.

On December 9 a pair of cranes that had been taught the route by Operation Migration's pilots in 2002 reached Chassahowitzka National Wildlife Refuge in Florida.

With the birds was a chick they had hatched in June—the first eastern wild-hatched whooping crane to make this migration in more than a century.

In a press release Duff called this family's successful migration "the ultimate validation of the work we do."

Richard Urbanek, a biologist with U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, is on the road tracking this family and other cranes along the eastern migration route.

Each crane that the Whooping Crane Eastern Partnership has introduced into the wild has a leg band and a radio-telemetry tag that can signal its location. Some birds have satellite tags as well.

Urbanek and members of the International Crane Foundation, a Wisconsin-based nonprofit, follow the cranes' movements during fall and spring migrations.

"We're learning where they go, where they stop, which birds are with who, what time the pairings occur," Urbanek said—all information that can aid in understanding the eastern crane population and improving its odds for long-term survival.

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