Whooping Crane Love Stories

Conservationists play matchmaker to one of the world's rarest birds

by

Eva Szyszkoski has spent much of her adult life trying to keep one of the rarest birds in the world from the brink of extinction. A wildlife technician with the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries, her work takes her both below the water table, wading through marshes with juvenile birds, and up in the sky, where she flies in a fixed-wing Cessna over the Chenier Plain, counting whooping crane nests. For over sixty years, these nests—which rise like little islands out of the shallow water—could not be found in any Louisiana ecosystem. By 1945, all but twenty-one of these birds had vanished from their natural habitats across North America, and the world wondered whether the tiny remaining flock would survive. But beginning in 2011, small groups of these five-foot-tall birds have been released each year in Southwest Louisiana, and this brand-new flock might finally be catching on in their bayou habitat.

When I spoke to Szyszkoski in mid-April, the Louisiana flock was about halfway through this year’s nesting season. She had just collected a pair of eggs from a failed nest near Gueydan and delivered them to LDWF headquarters in Baton Rouge for examination. By mid-May, she and her colleagues had counted twenty-eight nesting attempts, nine of which still contained viable eggs. Five chicks were still alive, teetering along somewhere behind their parents. The oldest of these is sixty-seven days old, nearing the crucial age when they can spread their wings and fly.

Though the season started slow, she said, “We’re happy with any chicks that hatch.” It’s a reminder that only seven years ago, the hatch of a single female whooping crane chick in Louisiana was celebrated the world over as a conservation victory. She was the first wild whooping crane to hatch in the state since 1939, and her survival to independence signaled that this experiment might just actually work.

[Writer Chris Staudinger first wrote about Louisiana's efforts in whooping crane conservation back in 2016, shortly after the first successful hatch of a chick in Louisiana's wild since 1939. Read it here.]

Generations of scientists and wildlife workers have struggled to understand the finicky reproductive preferences of these cranes. One pioneering ornithologist, Dr. George Archibald, started living in a pen with a female crane named Tex, “courting” her and dancing with her to convince her to lay eggs. This was in 1976, when only 75 whooping cranes survived in the wild. Every bird and its genetic material was absolutely essential. It took Tex seven years to hatch a successful chick, but she did, and her offspring—named Gee Whiz—sired more than 150 other birds.

As the scientific community got better at producing captive-reared birds, they started releasing them into the wild, but the reproductive difficulties persisted. Experimental flocks in Idaho and Florida were both discontinued after a combined twenty years because the birds failed to produce enough young in the wild. In a third experimental flock based in Wisconsin, only about sixteen wild-hatched chicks have survived as of 2021, despite the release of about 300 birds in the last two decades.

“You’re Mother Nature, helping provide enough so that they’re reproducing and doing well, but we can’t do better than Mother Nature.” —Richard Dunn

Louisiana’s flock, started in 2011, is the fourth of these experimental release programs, and it benefits from the experiences of those that came before it. Both Szyszkoski and LDWF biologist Sara Zimorski came to Louisiana after working with the Wisconsin flock. And last year was the best breeding season the initiative has seen yet—marking a milestone for the entire international effort to stabilize the wild whooping crane population.

“We had fifteen chicks hatch, and eight of them made it to fledging,” said Szyszkoski, noting that this was the most successful year for fledglings in a half-century of reintroduction efforts. “So, we’re chasing that goal.”

Louisiana possesses 40% of the coastal wetlands in the country, and the birds evidently enjoy this ecosystem for roaming and its plentiful food sources. “Last year was really a step in the right direction,” said Szyszkoski, “And I think it told us some more about the habitat that the birds are in, that they are able to successfully rear chicks to fledging.”

But she isn’t quite ready to celebrate. “Obviously, we’re not there yet,” she said, because along with the successes come the unexpected frustrations. There is a worrying pattern of recent embryo deaths, which is preventing many more eggs from hatching. The team is currently working with the United States Geological Survey Alaska Science Center to analyze these failed eggs.

There is also the poaching. Of the 175 birds released or fledged in Louisiana since 2011, only around 81 remain in the flock today. The birds have been killed by illness, bobcats, powerlines, and barbed wire fences—all of which are somewhat expected. But in Louisiana, 26% of the dead birds were shot by poachers, double the poaching rate of the Wisconsin flock. After a boost in education programs and the establishment of stiff penalties for individuals charged with the killings (one was sentenced of forty-five days in jail and another was fined $35,000), poaching numbers seem to be decreasing, to the relief of Szyszkoski and her colleagues.

Another explanation for this decline is that more people are learning about the birds. It helps that some of them have become quite famous. As LDWF follows the activities of the flock in superfine detail, they’ve attracted the attention of over 20,000 people across the world, who follow their efforts on the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries-Whooping Cranes Facebook page. As Szyszkoski and her colleagues track the birds via transmitters attached to their legs, they keep detailed records of pairings, whereabouts, journeys, disappearances, and about a million other measurements—much of which then gets shared with the public. Because whooping cranes develop intense, territorial bonds for each other, and they often mate for life—the narrative of reintroduction can often look like a whole lot of complicated love stories.

“I’ve always said it’s sort of like a soap opera,” said Szyszkoski. “If one bird loses their mate, then it can cause a chain reaction of pairs splitting up, and, you know, aggression between birds. It can be pretty crazy.”

Case in point is a now-famous Louisiana crane who veered off and established a bit of a territory near Beaumont. Her scientific name is “L14-17”, and her story has captured the attention of over 26 million viewers on Facebook. Hatched in 2017, L14-17 quickly paired with another young crane, and the duo soon split off from the rest of the Louisiana birds to take seasonal trips to East Texas together. In 2021, they finally started building nests there, and hatched at least one chick.

Sadly, L14-17’s partner died last summer. After the loss, instead of making the trip back to the wetlands of the Louisiana coast where she could find a new mate, she wandered around her breeding territory in East Texas alone. This left her with almost no chance of pairing again.

So, in early March of this year, Szyszkoski and colleagues from the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries’ whooping crane program decided to insert themselves into the drama. To do this, Szyszkoski left her human form behind, putting on a white cotton crane costume and briefly joining the flock. In her hands, she also carried a puppet, featuring a hyper-realistic crane head, sculpted and painted by an artist in Japan.

Capturing the five-foot-tall birds can get physical. “I have gotten many scars and bruises and scratches and stuff when we do captures,” Szyszkoski said, evidenced by the state of her costume. “Sara’s mom actually made it maybe like twelve years ago. And I really love it, because it’s very lightweight fabric, like really thin cotton. So anytime it gets ripped, like if a crane nail gets caught and tears a big hole, I just patch it. So, it doesn’t look the greatest. But it’s been through a lot.”

Because the cranes were raised in captivity by people wearing these costumes, L14-17 was not driven off by the approach of Szyszkoski in her patched-up robe. “They’re familiar with the costume. They sort of see us as a crane in a way,” she said.

When she approached the bird that day in the East Texas agricultural field, “She was pretty fired up (it being breeding season) and actually did briefly solicit me and dance. I think she finally realized I was ‘no good’ and she did threat displays, basically letting me walk up to her and grab her.”  The capture was complete when the team placed the bird safely into a cardboard box nearly the size of a refrigerator.

They drove her back to the White Lake Conservation area, in the wetlands southwest of Lafayette, and watched as the confused bird walked slowly towards the marshes, quickly distracted by the  prospect of eating something in the shallow water.

You can watch LDWF's viral video of L14-17's release in Vermilion Parish at White Lake WCA here: 

Only a week after L14-17’s release back in Louisiana, to the delight of her millions of fans online, this single lady had already been spotted mingling with a potential new partner.

Beth Guillet calls this eligible bachelor Junior. “He’s two years old this year,” said the Acadiana birdwatcher, and “from the time he was little, he just had this kind of strut about him.”

Guillet spends time following whooping cranes, often through quiet crawfish and rice fields west of Lafayette, and keeps an illustrated logbook of her sightings. She has watched Junior’s parents for a few years now as they flirt, nest, and dance. “They seem happy,” she said. “They evoke an emotion. You know, when they dance, they dance with abandon.”

Junior is an important bird for Guillet, because unlike most of his siblings, he has survived. Year after year, she’s watched the slow nesting process of Junior’s parents through her binoculars. And year after year, she’s also watched as these eggs fail and the chicks disappear. Junior’s parents have produced eight chicks and nearly twenty eggs over the years, but he is their only surviving offspring. If the key to the cranes’ success in Louisiana is that they go forth and multiply, few people understand how fragile the young flock is as well as Guillet.

Though Junior managed to survive to independence, the facts of his survival have still been tenuous.  When his parents were ready to nest again the following year, they drove him away. Around this time, his transmitter went out. Guillet explained, “For a while they couldn’t find him,” said Guillet. She feared he had been lost, like so many others in her logbook.

But then something unexpected happened. “He came back to his parents,” she said. “And they took him back.” Usually after a young crane is driven from the parents’ territory, he is forced to make a new family elsewhere. But instead they took him back, and Guillet watched from October until January as they bathed and played in the crawfish ponds.

When spring came again, Guillet saw Junior’s parents grabbing at the vegetation with their beaks, over and over, spreading it around, forming the grasses into the ring-shaped mounds that would become their cushy island nests. They chased him off again, and the timing coincided perfectly with the LDWF’s release of L14-17 from Texas, setting up a chance encounter at White Lake. “When they brought the crane from Texas, for a while it looked like they were going to pair up. I was so excited! . . . But then she dumped him and went with somebody else!” Guillet said, laughing.

L14-17 ultimately selected another bird, L3-21, as her mate, and was spotted nesting in Vermilion Parish in mid-April.

“I really take an interest in my cranes! I follow them,” Guillet said.  “It’s a curiosity. I would love to see them every day. I would like—it might not be in my lifetime—but I would like to think that one day there would be enough in Louisiana that they wouldn’t be such a rare sight.”

It’s tough to put a finger on where the Louisiana population of whooping cranes stands today, whether it is a flock actively moving towards wild status or simply a precarious, ever-uphill battle against embryo deaths and slow succession. When I posed this question to Richard Dunn, the Assistant Curator at the Audubon Species Survival Center in New Orleans, he didn’t really hesitate. “It could fall apart,” he admitted.

“If we stopped putting chicks out in Louisiana, you know, is there enough to sustain the population? We don’t know that. So yeah. It’s still fragile.” But the risk, he said, doesn’t end with the Louisiana population. It’s a real worry for the main whooping crane population as well, which migrates between South Texas and Alberta, Canada. This is the flock that was hunted and squeezed to less than twenty birds last century, but has now steadily climbed to nearly 600. Dunn explained that the habitat for those birds is actually quite small and at a constant risk from hurricanes, drought, development, and water quality issues. “We can in one fell swoop lose most of the population,” he said, which makes the Louisiana population all the more crucial.

Dunn is part of a rather mind-blowing network of people that extends thousands of miles out from the flock, working full-time to supply the reintroduction efforts with young crane chicks. He runs an impressive operation: seventeen whooping cranes plus a flock of endangered sandhill cranes move around in a series of pens, ponds, and electronics-filled hatching rooms, all tucked in a sprawling wooded reserve that feels a world apart, even though it’s right on the Westbank of Orleans Parish.

I visited the breeding center in 2016, and as we walked between the pens of the captive cranes, we had to keep our voices down to avoid disturbing the nesting birds. It was a wet morning and birdsong was everywhere. “They eat a lot of insects,” he said of the cranes. “They love the wild strawberries that grow here. They go nuts for them.”

Dunn has spent his life admiring animals, volunteering at his hometown zoo in Indiana, banding flamingos in the Bahamas, training and flying over fifty species of birds for a show at SeaWorld, caring for raptors at the Fort Worth Zoo. He recognizes that the whooping crane is but one tall species among many more that are threatened today. According to the most recent State of the World’s Birds report, 160 bird species have been lost in the last five hundred years, and those extinctions are accelerating.

Part of the challenge to species reintroduction, and especially raising birds in captivity, is that biologically, there are so many unseen variables at play in an often-stressed environment. “You’re Mother Nature, helping provide enough so that they’re reproducing and doing well,” he said, but “we can’t do better than Mother Nature.”

The challenges will remain so long as these species’ ecosystems remain in peril. “If we ever get our act together and conserve our natural environment, we will have those animals ready to be able to go back out there,” he said of the captive breeding operations.   

In the meantime, he is doing his small part and enjoying the victories, like when one of his older cranes, Boudreaux, recently found a mate. The bird has been at Audubon for a decade without a partner, but when a new crane arrived, “It was like love at first sight, you know. They’ve been together and dancing. They haven’t laid yet. So, we’re expecting an egg every day from them. That’s our hope.” 

Learn more about whooping crane reintroduction efforts in Louisiana at wlf.louisiana.gov and audubonnatureinstitute.org/freeport-mcmoran-audubon-species-survival-center; and more about the national efforts at savingcranes.org.