Louisiana's Whooping Cranes

In April of this year, two whooping cranes in Jefferson Davis Parish made national news when they hatched a chick in a farmer’s crawfish field; the chick marked the first successful hatch of a wild whooping crane in Louisiana since 1939. In May, two more whooping cranes were shot and killed on the side of a road in Acadia Parish. With the number of wild whooping cranes in Louisiana hovering at around forty, every addition and subtraction has implications for the species’ survival here. No one feels this significance more than Sara Zimorski, who leads the whooping crane team with the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries. As the breeding season came to an end this summer, Zimorski took me for a ride to see two whooping cranes who were sitting on an egg in its final week of incubation.

At a gas station in Jefferson Davis Parish, we climbed into a Ford Expedition with the LDWF logo emblazoned along its sides. (To protect landowners and the safety of the birds, access to nesting sites is controlled, and the LDWF keeps the locations secret.) Zimorski is remarkable for her knowledge of the cranes, both in Louisiana and across the country. As we drove through the rice and crawfish fields on our way to the nest, she gave an update on the new chick and its parents, which have precariously been nicknamed the “first family.” At nine weeks old, she said, the chick was already over four feet tall, “almost as tall as the mom.” The species is the tallest in North America. But despite its size, she explained, the chick was still extremely vulnerable, scampering on the ground amongst the bobcats and coyotes; it still needed another three to four weeks before it fledged, increasing its odds of survival.

When an entire species numbers only six hundred, the stories of each individual become much more compelling. The mother of the first family was produced by a pair of cranes at the Calgary Zoo in Canada. Not yet hatched, she was flown, in ovum, to a federal breeding facility in Maryland, where she was incubated in a machine, hatched, and then reared by humans. The father was produced by two captive cranes at the International Crane Foundation, a breeding facility in Baraboo, Wisconsin. That egg was likewise shipped to the Maryland breeding center, Patuxent Wildlife Research Center. Each year, about fifteen of these young birds take a one-way flight (in boxes) from Maryland down to Jennings Airport, where Zimorski and her team gradually introduce them to the Louisiana wilds.

As we turned down a gravel road, Zimorski updated us on the two birds we were visiting. “These guys hatched in 2011, so they’re five years old,” she said. Each nest is tended not only by two cranes, which mate for life, but also by the LDWF team, which conducts weekly three-hour observations of each pair. From the close monitoring, the team gathered that the egg, if it were to hatch, would need another week of incubation after our visit. Months earlier, they also determined that a satellite transmitter connected to the male’s leg was making it painful for him to sit on the nest. “So we grabbed him and cut off the transmitter, and his leg seems to be doing better,” said Zimorski, adding, “We didn’t want any extra disturbance, so we did go out in the costume because that’s more familiar than people going out close to them.”

These juvenile whooping cranes, distinguishable from adults by their brown markings, are being raised in captivity by humans in white costumes equipped with an adult crane-head puppet designed to mimic the real thing. Photo: Eva Szyszkoski, Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries.

As famous as the whooping crane has become for its vulnerability or its primal howl, it has become equally sensational for the measures that humans have taken to avert its extinction. The “costume” is a billowy off-white robe that hides the human form from impressionable chicks. Capped with a white head cover and a black screen that obscures the human face, the costume evokes a stormtrooper, especially since crane handlers operate in total silence. The uniform might terrify an unsuspecting human, but the captive-raised whooping cranes are comfortable with it because they were handled for the first months of their lives by a costumed human. 

[Unlike almost every other place along the Louisiana coast, land is growing, not disappearing, at the base of the Wax Lake Outlet.]

Before coming to Louisiana in 2011, Zimorski spent a lot of time in the costume as an aviculturist at the International Crane Foundation. There, using a decoy crane head attached to the arm of the robe, she taught chicks to take their first sips of water and worked on artificial insemination projects. Some of the chicks she reared went to an experimental flock that resided in Florida; others went to an experimental flock in Wisconsin. The latter juveniles were persuaded by humans to migrate from Wisconsin to Florida, following a costumed human at the helm of an ultralight aircraft two thousand feet in the sky. Zimorski helped track those birds across the eight states of their migration, which they now navigate annually without assistance. 

We arrived at the edge of the crawfish field where the pair was nesting. The whooping crane is striking and stately, even with its snow-white feathers covered in mud. From behind a dark mask, it stares coolly down its long black beak. On the crown of its head is a ruby-red patch of bare skin, which the bird can expand with blood and whip forward in a show of dominance. They’ve been known to use their beaks to stab other birds in the back of the neck.

These two parents, hatched in 2011, were discovered to be incubating a single egg, which, if viable, would have hatched in June. The pair had been under regular observations by the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries whooping crane team, which monitors the Louisiana whooping crane population. Photo by Thomas Finnie.

Our birds easily dwarfed the great egrets and every other bird foraging in the pond. Watching them lord over the space from atop their meter-wide island of a nest, it was easy to wonder how these birds, which once ranged from the Chesapeake to Canada’s Northwest Territories, became so critically endangered. Fossils date the species to about sixty million years old; by the 1950s, the wild population of the entire species was about twenty. “There are probably reasons why they were never numerous and why they were closer to extinction [than other birds],” Zimorski said. “They don’t give themselves a lot of chances. They don’t start breeding until they’re three to five years of age. They lay two eggs maximum. And if they’re good, maybe they raise one chick successfully a year.”

Still, there were an estimated fifteen thousand whooping cranes before colonization. Today, they collide easily with power lines, and shrinking wetlands leave their eggs exposed to raccoons. “There are too many people, and the habitat is just not what it used to be,” Zimorski said.

[Also read: An excerpt from C.C. Lockwood's "Louisiana Wild: The Protected and Restored Lands of The Nature Conservancy"]

In Louisiana, the birds relied heavily on the bluestems and switchgrass of the Cajun prairie, which used to sprawl 3.4 million hectares across Southwest Louisiana. So much of it was cleared, mostly for rice, that only about one percent remains. Then the wetlands began to disappear, too, as landowners drained large tracts to create additional farmland. Between 1950 and 1980, over eighty percent of new agricultural land was converted from wetland acreage, according to the National Research Council. 

On top of it all, the stark-white, five-foot-tall birds made easy targets. When Claude Eagleson was interviewed in the ‘90s in Gay M. Gomez’ “Whooping Cranes in Southwest Louisiana: History and Human Attitudes” (published in Proceedings of the North American Crane Workshop 6, 1992), he described seeing whooping cranes “up there in the sky, always seven or eight in a bunch, circling and crossing each other like people square dancing.” He said he would find them foraging in his sweet potato patch and shoot them there. “There was a lot of meat to ‘em: the neck gave you a pot full, and the gizzard was good, too. We ate them mostly in gumbo.” 

In 1950, the last wild Louisiana crane was tracked by helicopter, captured, and brought to the Aransas National Wildlife Refuge in Texas, joining the twenty-six birds that constituted the final wild flock of whooping cranes in the world. The Louisiana bird died six months later; but those twenty-six birds, after six decades of intense protective efforts, have managed to multiply into a flock of three hundred.

Still, the bird’s escape from extinction is far from guaranteed. Despite the success of the Texas flock, experts worry that a single hurricane or disease outbreak could put the entire species in danger. In the winter of 2009, eight and a half percent of that flock died when a drought struck the Guadalupe river basin. Researchers have tried four times to introduce whooping cranes into the wild to cushion the population. Despite some disappointing results in the first three projects (of 289 birds released in Florida, less than ten remain), Zimorski is clinically optimistic about the species’ prospects in Louisiana. The state is home to forty percent of all wetlands in the continental United States, and unlike central Florida, she said, the habitat “is not as much in danger of being bought up by developers. It’s not beach development.”

But this year, four out of five pairs of whooping cranes chose not to nest in the marshes. They chose agricultural fields instead, taking experts by surprise. “I think a lot of folks sort of thought that the birds would stay in the marsh,” Zimorski said. “But the birds who have come out have found there’s hundreds of thousands of acres of rice and crawfish fields that are also providing habitat.” It wasn’t until the 1960s that crawfish farming even existed in Louisiana—a decade after the extinction of the whooping crane in the state. But between 1960 and 1980, there was a thirty-fold increase in crawfish farms, each its own small ecosystem full of turtles, snakes, bugs, and birds. There’s stable water, ample food, and few predators for a nesting crane. As we watched the nest, a covered crawfish boat baited traps in the distance. Zimorski said that these two birds were initially scared away from their nest by the big boat, but eventually got used to the humans. 

Whether the humans get used to the cranes is perhaps a more difficult question. In January, two Louisiana whooping cranes were shot and killed on a rural road in east Texas. In response to the shooting, Dr. Liz Smith of the International Crane Foundation released a statement saying, “Whooping Cranes face enough challenges to survival without senseless vandalism. … Over the past five years, more than 20 Whooping Cranes have been shot and killed in the United States. It’s high time that this preventable threat comes to an end.” In May, two more birds were found dead near Highway 35 in Acadia Parish. Ten out of the twenty-two killings in the U.S. have come from the Louisiana flock, an outsized number considering Louisiana only carries thirty-nine of the four-hundred-plus wild whooping cranes on the continent. 

Zimorski is a scientist who usually speaks objectively, but talking about the poaching left her visibly exasperated. Asked if Louisiana’s birds are becoming known as the poached flock, she said, “Unfortunately it’s starting to seem more that way. … There are people who do say that maybe the bird should not be in Louisiana anymore.” 

Barbara Clauss is not one of those people. As a technician at Patuxent, she’s reared every bird sent to Louisiana. She wishes the people responsible for the killings could see the staggering amount of work that goes into rearing and releasing each bird: “If they only knew what it took to raise their parents, how long it took to get their parents together, how long it took them to lay an egg, how long it took them to get them to incubate. The chicks are the product of so much.” Still, Clauss is encouraged by the Louisiana flock, especially after the historic first-family hatch, and hopes that LDWF’s whooping crane education campaign (plus stiff penalties for the offenders) will curb the number of killings.

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The nest we observed never did produce a chick; the LDWF crew, using brooms to fend off the aggressive parents, collected the egg and determined it was infertile. In May, an 18-year-old Beaumont man named Trey Joseph Frederick pled guilty to a Class A misdemeanor for violating the Endangered Species Act; he faces penalties of up to $50,000 plus jail time for the January shootings. No arrests have been made for the May killings in Acadia Parish. As of press time, the first family is scampering around the marshes of Southwest Louisiana, biding its time until the chick can fly, lessening its chances of predation.