Whooping cranes are back at a national wildlife refuge in Alabama

[Beringia]

https://www.cbs42.com/news/local/whooping-cranes-return-to-alabama-national-wildlife-refuge/

The International Crane Foundation said Friday that, for the second year in a row, wild-hatched chick W7-17 was the first to arrive at the Wheeler National Wildlife Refuge in Decatur. The two-year-old arrived Nov. 9.

She’s among about 100 whoopers in a flock taught to migrate from Wisconsin to Florida by following ultralight aircraft.

Crane foundation outreach assistant A.J. Binney says about one-third of them winter in Alabama.


Map of location

http://map.bringbackthecranes.org/





(According to this article from NPR in 2016, they stopped the project that had been ongoing for 15 years. So it must have been a success after all. )

https://www.npr.org/2016/03/02/468045219/to-make-a-wild-comeback-cranes-need-more-than-flying-lessons

Now, however, biologists have discovered that teaching the cranes to migrate seems to have created serious problems for the birds — they rarely reproduce successfully. The Federal Fish & Wildlife Service has halted the flights and is now trying to figure out what went wrong.

"We have two separate problems," she explains. "One, the eggs don't make it. Two, even if the eggs make it, the chicks don't make it." The cranes mate well enough. But fewer than 1 in 10 reproducing pairs actually raises a chick that lives more than four months. "It's not like we're almost there with reproduction," says Converse. "We're not really anywhere close. And so it sort of suggests that there's something wrong with the birds and the way they behave." The parents may not be staying with the eggs long enough. Or they may not know how to protect the eggs or the newly hatched chicks from predators.


Whooping Crane with Sandhill Cranes New Mexico 1997

https://macaulaylibrary.org/asset/407739

[klook]

1. Fantastic news - thanks. (nt)

[Ilsa]

2. The whooping cranes made it to South Texas at

the end of October. They winter at the Aransas National Wildlife Refuge.

[Beringia]

6. I don't know much about them

I know a bit more about Sandhill cranes from when I lived in Wisconsin and saw them often.

The Texas to Canada is called the western flock. The article says the population was down to 15 cranes in 1940s and all cranes are descendants of those 15. Amazing.


https://journeynorth.org/tm/crane/FlockWest.html

[Ilsa]

12. I used to be able to hear the sandhill cranes

from inside my house when we lived there.

[mopinko]

3. sandhills are def doing well, tho.

there are hundreds of them in northern illinois right now, starting out.

[OnlinePoker]

4. "And so it sort of suggests that there's something wrong with the birds and the way they behave"

I was an annual donor to Operation Migration, the organization that led the ultra-light migrations south from the nesting grounds in Wisconsin. The effort was shut down by the US F&W service in 2016. One of the big issues they had in the nesting ground in Wisconsin was black flies. While they had no definitive proof, they speculated that the adults abandoned the nests because they couldn't take the swarms of flies that descended on them when they were nesting. This led to a greater than expected nest failure annually. Whoopers will nest in the same area they were raised in so it's too late to get them to change that habit. It's hoped that autumn released birds (no trained migration) will choose other locations to nest, but it hadn't happened by the time OM was shut down.

[Beringia]

5. Autumn release means no trained migration

So how do they know how to migrate?

Why is it called autumn released.

[OnlinePoker]

8. They hatch the eggs and rear the young in captivity

Then they release them in the area the wild/migration trained birds are and hope they follow along. I don't know how successful the program has been. I do know that from zero migrating when OM started, they had over 100 birds flying when the program was cancelled.

[Beringia]

9. Thanks

[wendyb-NC]

7. Great news!

[eppur_se_muova]

10. AL recently made it *LEGAL* to hunt sandhill cranes -- so you know you can expect ...

... some idiot will blast a couple of whooping cranes, mistaking them for sandhill cranes.

[Beringia]

11. I had a similar thought

about the F&W and hunters are just waiting for their numbers to be high enough so they can have a hunting season.