Eight whooping cranes are disoriented after humans in North Carolina scare them. They are now on the wrong side of Lake Michigan.
By AMY WIMMER SCHWARB
Published May 4, 2004
Humans likely got these birds into this mess. Now the question is: Should humans get them out of it?
Eight whooping cranes, hatched in captivity one year ago and trying to migrate on their own for the first time, are stuck on the east side of Lake Michigan. Their summer home, where they were raised and taught to follow the human-piloted ultralight aircraft that led them along their migratory route to Florida last fall, is on the west.
And cranes don't fly over water.
"They're sitting on the shore of Lake Michigan," said Heather Ray with Operation Migration, the group that taught the birds their migratory route, "looking longingly across the other side."
In a conference call scheduled for today, organizations that help hatch, train and monitor the cranes will discuss what to do about the birds. One option is to let them fend for themselves. Another is to capture and relocate them to Necedah, Wis., the summer home for this extraordinary flock, where they would be reunited with other whooping cranes.
Crane-watchers had hoped the birds would head south toward Chicago and figure out their own way around Lake Michigan. Five of the birds gave up and headed back to Ohio, where they have roosted for the past three weeks.
The other three are, indeed, looking for a way around the lake, but they headed the wrong direction.
"We were hoping they might then continue going west around the lake," said Joan Garland, a spokeswoman for the International Crane Foundation. "Now they're heading farther northeast, instead of going around it the way they should be going."
Meanwhile, at least five young cranes have hatched at the U.S. Geological Survey's Patuxent Wildlife Research Center in Maryland.
They are the beginning of the Class of 2004, which will be trained to fly with an ultralight aircraft to the Chassahowitzka National Wildlife Refuge this fall.
Ray believes the cranes were disoriented after a run-in with humans in North Carolina. There, the birds were frightened away by groups of people who spotted and, in some cases, tried to approach the whoopers. One man, a nearby neighbor told monitors who follow the tagged cranes, even tried to ease close enough to catch one.
At one point, when Richard Urbanek, a crane monitor from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, left to find a motel room, a family of five exited their car and approached the birds, frightening the birds so much that they took off. They circled overhead for almost an hour before finally flying northward, according to Operation Migration. One crane hit a power line, a move that has killed whooping cranes in the past, but he survived.
The scare forced the birds to fly by moonlight, which they seldom if ever do. Some crane officials blame this moonlit flight for their disorientation.
Fewer than 500 whooping cranes are known to exist. Of those, 39 of them are in this captive-born flock, in which the cranes are trained as chicks to follow the hum of an ultralight aircraft that eventually guides them on a migratory route to Chassahowitzka.
The birds are then expected to return to Wisconsin on their own, using their built-in global positioning systems that scientists still cannot decipher.
The flock of 16 now trying to return home to Wisconsin - half of them have already succeeded - are part of the third year of this project, designed to introduce a new flock of migrating whoopers to the eastern United States.
In the history of the project, four birds have been captured and relocated to Necedah. One bird got off-course and was in Ohio, by herself. When a human wearing one of this project's famed "crane costumes" appeared to rescue her, the crane was happy to have company and was easily captured.
Three birds were captured last year from South Dakota, a capture necessitated by the fact that South Dakota is not one of the 18 states and two Canadian provinces that agree to protect the cranes as they fly over during their migration. One of those birds died from complications of his capture.
For Ray, the cranes' difficulty is a lesson in why humans should limit their interactions with wildlife.
"The bottom line is, these people should not have gotten anywhere near them. They're wild creatures," Ray said. "Every time you stop your car at the side of the road to look at a deer, you're teaching that deer tolerance."
- Amy Wimmer Schwarb can be reached at 352 860-7305 or wimmer@sptimes.com
