(c) 1996 Copyright Nando.net
1996 Scripps Howard
St. Petersburg Times
KISSIMMEE PRAIRIE, Fla. (Mar 8, 1996 - 08:58 EST) -- Night comes to a ranch east of Lake Kissimmee. Under a starlit sky, four men and a woman from the Florida Game and Fresh Water Fish Commission set out toward a plastic corral set in a cow field.
Inside the pen there is a brief commotion of humans chasing big birds, accompanied by a chaos of flashlight beams. One by one, five people step from the night into floodlights mounted on a pickup truck.
Each carries a flapping, pecking, kicking young whooping crane.
They arrange themselves on metal folding chairs, restraining their charges like parents in a pediatric waiting room.
"Calm down, sweetie," instructs Amy Zimmerling, striving to comfort and contain a terrified 13-pound bird.
In one day, she and her colleagues have assisted with medical checkups of 15 juvenile whooping cranes. Just a few decades ago, there weren't many more whoopers than that in the entire world.
Quietly and carefully, state biologists have brought to Florida the world's second largest population of whoopers -- and the only population that doesn't migrate. Since February 1993, the state has imported 90 juvenile whoopers born at captive breeding centers in Maryland and Wisconsin.
With consent of three cattle ranches, all are being freed on a marsh-dotted prairie east of Lake Kissimmee, barely an hour south of Disney World.
In the federal plan to save a bird that defied extinction, Florida has become the insurance policy.
The largest community of whooping cranes winters in Texas, beside the busiest shipping channel in the Gulf of Mexico. They "are highly vulnerable to elimination by a hurricane or a spill of hazardous chemicals," says Marty Folk, a biologist who observes the Florida cranes daily.
Asked what makes whooping cranes special, Folk gropes for an explanation. How to describe this bird that leaps and dances and bows, that calls with a trumpet's power, a bird so large it seems to fly in slow motion, and so white it seems to glow against dark clouds?
"You always feel they're a special bird, but it's hard to put it in words," Folk says. "I guess I'd say majestic. Magnificent."
Whooping cranes are the tallest birds in North America. In repose they have the ungainly look of swans on stilts. Standing erect, their sinuous necks raised, adults reach a height of 5 feet -- tall enough to look a short person in the eye. In flight their wings spread 7 feet wide.
They communicate from a trachea that, uncoiled, would be 5 feet long. On a quiet day their trumpet may be heard 2 miles away.
It is Wednesday evening, at dusk. Usually, game commission biologists release a few whooping cranes at a time. This evening, they will be handling 15 cranes.
Their work began with an afternoon shipment of five hissing cranes in wooden crates marked "Live Bird." They attached a radio transmitter and a bright ID band to each crane's legs, then carried it to a holding pen where it will be observed for two weeks.
By nightfall, they were ready to release 10 other cranes that had completed their observation period in a pen.
But first, each must endure a veterinary visit.
Zimmerling is first. She clasps her crane tightly, one hand under its belly, the other gripping its legs at the joints.
Marilyn Spalding, the crane doctor, removes a blue hood that had been slipped over the crane's head to ease its panic. A bright yellow eye blinks in the sudden light.
Spalding pries open the crane's beak and peeks in with a small flashlight. She checks its breathing with a stethoscope. She examines its legs and wings. A fecal sample is taken to check for bacteria and parasites. A blood sample is extracted from its neck. An encephalitis shot is injected in its belly. Everything is noted on a medical chart.
Next, it's weigh-in time. As a sling is wrapped around it, the crane somehow frees one wing. It thrashes furiously, swatting Zimmerling in the head until three people subdue it on the ground, fold its wing into the sling and get it to the scale.
The young crane weighs 12.8 pounds. "It feels heavier," Zimmerling said.
Finally, a plastic strip that restricted one wing is snipped off, leaving the crane free to fly. If it stays healthy, it also may be free of human contact for the rest of its life.
Half a century ago, when ornithologist Robert Allen set out to find the last of the whooping cranes, he struggled to get within binocular distance of the survivors wintering at what is now the Aransas National Wildlife Refuge in Texas.
This evening, under floodlights, their descendants are scrutinized from a distance of inches.
The birds' soft juvenile feathers, a caramel-tipped white, soon will be shed for the pure white plumage of adulthood. A mosaic pattern, strikingly similar to alligator hide, laces their long black legs. Their toes form a long tripod, lending balance to a seemingly awkward body, and their claws are sharp.
The middle toe, especially, has a knife-like edge. When a whooping crane leaps and kicks, it can slice a person. Blood is not a rare sight on crane handling nights.
Checkups completed, wings unbound, the cranes are released at night inside their pen. This helps them adjust to sudden freedom in a secure place; danger is not far away.
Nearly half the young whooping cranes brought to Florida in the last three years have died. With one exception, all perished in the jaws of bobcats.
Whooping cranes sleep standing up, often balancing on one leg. To protect themselves at night, they need to do so in six to 10 inches of water. It's a simple and effective defense. No bobcat can sneak up without splashing.
The whooping crane's journey to Florida began 21 years ago with a wild idea.
Take whooping crane eggs. Slip them into nests of sandhill cranes that don't migrate. Let the sandhills become foster parents. Presto! Non-migrating whoopers.
Steve Nesbitt, then a young biologist with the Florida game commission, proposed this idea in 1975 to the federal recovery team for the endangered whooping crane.
The project would consume his adult life.
Whooping cranes had come desperately close to extinction. Midwest prairie marshes had yielded to the plow. Those that survived were large and slow in flight. Hundreds were shot for food.
By the early 1940s, only 20 remained. Three decades later, when Nesbitt ushered Florida into the recovery plan, their numbers were growing but still terribly low.
Generally, female whooping cranes lay two eggs, but one chick often kills its sibling. In Idaho, biologists were trying to improve whooping crane reproduction by taking the extra egg and letting it hatch in a nest of a migrating sandhill crane.
Steve Nesbitt hoped to borrow a technique from Idaho to restore non-migrating cranes to Louisiana, where the creatures had lived until the 1940s. Non-migrating Florida sandhill cranes would be exported to Louisiana, where they would serve as foster parents to whooping cranes hatched in their nests.
Initially, Florida was to be merely the testing ground for a key preliminary question: Is migrating a learned or genetic behavior in cranes?
To answer it, Nesbitt planned to take eggs laid by "snowbird" sandhills, place them in nests of "native" sandhills -- and watch the results.
But as he prepared to test this hypothesis, the Idaho crane project was coming to a tragic realization. Female whoopers raised with sandhills wouldn't mate.
"Then we looked at another idea," Nesbitt recalls. "What if we just take young birds raised in captivity by their own kind and release them into the wild?"
The birds behaved just as Nesbitt hoped and demonstrated that migration was a learned behavior. This was a key discovery, since many whoopers die during migration, due to starvation or crashing into power lines in the fog.
"We can make them not migrate," Nesbitt happily reported to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in 1988.
In 1989, Florida was chosen as the host state for a new population of endangered whooping cranes.
From the extra egg in the whooping crane's nest, a federal science center in Laurel, Md., and the International Crane Foundation in Baraboo, Wis., were breeding captive birds.
"We got the first shipment of whoopers Jan. 10, 1993. Released them Feb. 10," Nesbitt says. "The rest is history."
Today, nearly 300 whooping cranes dwell in wildlife refuges or in captivity.
Most of the wild cranes winter in the Aransas refuge on the Texas coast, near ships passing through an intracoastal waterway to the ports of Galveston, Houston and Corpus Christi. In the spring they fly 2,600 miles north to a remote national park in the Northwest Territories of Canada.
To the west, a doomed population of eight non-breeding whooping cranes still migrates between Idaho and New Mexico.
In Florida, birds of every feather crowd the shores of Lake Kissimmee on a warm winter day.
Folk's count: Of 91 cranes brought to Florida, 52 are alive.
Spared from disease and predators, whooping cranes can live 25 years and may spend much of that lifetime with a single mate. They don't reach sexual maturity until age 4 or 5, and the oldest Florida whooping cranes will turn 4 this year.
None has tried to build a nest yet, but "we've seen some preliminary activity that seems to be moving in the right direction. Jumping up and down, grabbing sticks, throwing them in the air," Folk says.
"We'll be watching closely this spring."
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