by hilzoy
Whooping Cranes are some of the most beautiful birds on earth:
In 1941, there were only 21 wild Whooping Cranes in existence. Now there are nearly 400. There are two main flocks: a migratory flock that winters in Aransas National Wildlife Refuge in Texas, and a nonmigratory flock in Florida. Recently, scientists have been trying to establish a migratory flock in the east. This is difficult: cranes learn to migrate from their parents, and there are no adult cranes who migrate in the eastern US. To get around this problem, cranes are hatched in Maryland and moved to what we hope will become their nesting grounds in Wisconsin, where they are raised by people wearing crane costumes, to prevent them from imprinting on humans:
When the chicks are a bit older, “Mom” begins riding around in a wingless Ultralight aircraft, and teaches the chicks to follow “her”:
Finally, “Mom” flies off in “her” Ultralight, followed by “her” chicks, and they all set off on their fall migration:
This year, there were eighteen chicks, and all of them made it safely from Wisconsin to Florida. That’s one of the things that makes this so hard to bear:
“All 18 endangered young whooping cranes that were led south from Wisconsin last fall as part of a project to create a second migratory flock of the birds were killed in storms in Florida, a spokesman said.
The cranes were being kept in an enclosure at the Chassahowitzka National Wildlife Refuge near Crystal River, Fla., when violent storms moved in Thursday night, said Joe Duff, co-founder of Operation Migration, the organization coordinating the project.
“The birds were checked in late afternoon the day before, and they were fine,” he said Friday.
The area of the enclosure was unreachable by workers at night, and all the birds were found dead, Duff said. He speculated that a strong storm surge drew the tide in and overwhelmed the birds. The official cause of the deaths was not immediately known, but he said it may have been drowning.”
Eighteen birds is around five per cent of the total wild population of Whooping Cranes on earth. It’s a horrible loss.
You can see video of these very birds here, and photos of their first and only migration here. I find the photos — of young birds making strange, ungainly landings, swaggering around trying to establish dominance over one another, halfway between their brown juvenile plumage and the adult black and white — incredibly sad.
Obviously, my heart also goes out to the families of the human beings who lost their lives or their homes in the storms.
50 years ago this would have been about 50% of the world’s whooping crane population, with the other 50% located in Texas.
I’m really sorry to hear about this. I’m not surprised, however.
I saw a Townsend’s warbler here about three weeks ago. Wrong time of year. Since then we have had snow and days of freezing temperatures. I don’t see how it could still be alive.
One may have survived ?
A whooping crane believed killed with 17 others in severe Florida storms may be alive, because a signal transmitting from the bird indicates it survived, an official said Sunday.
I had the privilege of seeing one when I was about 12 at the Aransas Pass National Wildlife Refuge, there were only about half the number then that there are today. Still, bad news.
Though compared to Hilzoy, and any bird watcher, I know squat about birds, since I do read general science and nature stuff a lot, I’ve read about this before, and I’d just like to observe that: a) human beings are very interesting creatures, to do these things; and b) along with all the bad things we do, including to other species, such as contribute to endless extinctions, human beings also do things like this. All hope is not lost for us.
> All hope is not lost for us
You want hope?
Join the Nature Conservancy.
Meet these people, who are spending their lives attempting to save all of Creation for their unappreciative contemporaries and for all of our posterity. Help however you can.
I have seen the prairie flora of Iowa snatched from the brink of extirpation, until now Silphium blooms in the ditches amidst the Indian Grass and Little Bluestem.
(Thank you, Aldo Leopold)
At Aransas, in every state, the Nature Conservancy acts to create permanent habitat reservations. Big ones.
You want elegiac despair?
Read _The_Echo_Maker_ by Richard Powers.
But don’t give up.
We actually had a bald eagle hang out here for a bit last week. I know, they are no longer endangered, still it’s the first time in my lifetime that one has been spotted where I actually live.
It’s probably worth noting that the storms in question were strong enough to have produced three tornadoes (one F3) that killed about 20 people not all that far from where I live.
Also worth noting is that the lone survivor is confirmed.
I saw a lovely TV show about humans and migrating cranes. It was sandhills, not wwhooperrs, and the ultralite was trracking, not leading. The purpose was to help re-establish a migration route and the concern was that some of the first-time mirators would get lost. The cranes and the ultralite were followed by a couple pickup trucks. Whenever a crane wandered off from the miration rounte, a truck followed it and, when the crane landed, the truck person gave it a ride back to the flock. The crnaes got to ride in the truck in the passenger seat. I doubt if they used seaat belts but they sat right up and looked out the window.
Yeah, I like it when people do stuff like that. Also, I am a member of the Nature Conservancy. It is a wonderful organization.
I see sandhill cranes nearly every day.
Nature Conservancy…something that I really need to remember to join. Preferably before we go back to one income this fall.
I’m glad that you and yors weren’t hurt by the storm, Slart!
It’s a rare treat for me to see a crane. They migrate through but their layby area is about a hundred miles away.
The wood storks are in trouble. There aren’t very many of them and they hhave been unable to raise babies for several years.
Off Topic – John Yoo continues to get to write lame editorials for legal publications. I lost count of the non-sequiturs (and the fact that he’s bemoaning a “judicial power grab” is laughable from the man who went around defending Bush v. Gore).
Slarti — I’m glad you weren’t hurt. Also, on rereading, the part about the humans reads like an add-on; it wasn’t meant that way. (I was horrified by the storms, and tried to think of something to write on Sat., but failed utterly.) The pictures of solid brick houses reduced to rubble, not to mention the thought of people in them who heard that “storms” were coming, and thought: well, maybe there will be a mild leak in the roof, but surely a mere storm can’t harm my solid brick house, as they went to sleep — it just seemed particularly horrible.
We actually had a bald eagle hang out here for a bit last week.
I live near a big park in Manhattan, and for the last five years or so, they’ve been introducing bald eagle chicks. People feed them until they can fly, at which point they go off and find homes for themselves somewhere in the Hudson Valley.
Astonishing birds. I only saw one close up once — one of them (grown to full size, but without the white head yet) got confused while learning to fly, and spent an afternoon flapping from one tree to another around the Little League fields. She was ridiculously huge — it was like looking at an airborne pickup truck: something just too big to be hanging in the air.
“All 18 endangered young whooping cranes that were led south from Wisconsin last fall as part of a project to create a second migratory flock of the birds were killed in storms in Florida, a spokesman said.
Huh. So that’s what we grilled yesterday.
You know, I’d thought I’d read all the way down to the bottom, but evidently I missed that bit. Typical; my fault. But I wasn’t pinging you for missing or minimizing, just noting that some very bad other things happened as a result of that storm.
It wasn’t all that close to me. Just under 50 miles, now that I look at it. Shocking, really, to wake up to the news. We had a mild blow; didn’t even have any tree branches down, while people just up the road had death and destruction.
Oh, and we see bald eagles around my part of the country quite a lot. Once I was just chatting with my neighbor, and these two rather large birds come screeching down the street at fairly low altitude, bickering like squirrels and wrestling while flying.
Adolescent bald eagles.
Slarti: I didn’t think you were; it was something that had been niggling at me — one of those things about which you think: should I update to say this? Wouldn’t that just somehow make it worse, like explaining a joke that doesn’t bear explanation, except this isn’t a joke? Blah blah blah.
OCSteve: if you ever find yourself around Conowingo dam, check out the eagles there. When the dam lets water through, it stuns or kills any fish who come through with the water, which makes it sort of like a bird feeder for fish-eating birds. The first time I went, I saw seventy (70!!!) Bald Eagles. Admittedly, it was a particularly good day, but wow.
Also, many herons and gulls, and a very nice footpath.
QED, you live near Inwood.
(I’ve lived in a variety of places between 181st and Dyckman, myself; Fairview Avenue for a number of years. How are the #1/9 these days?)
“Shocking, really, to wake up to the news.”
It led all the network news broadcasts Saturday evening; they kept emphasising that these weren’t mobile homes, but utterly solid brick, as they interviewed the stunned survivors.
Not knowing any of the poor people who went through it, I’m glad you and your family were fifty miles away.
We actually haven’t had snow coming down for two days now, and although it’s still below freezing at the moment, the prediction is for the temperature to finally rise today, into the fifties, even, so it’s conceivable that I might finally see no snow on the ground for the first time in nearly two months. Maybe. Should be less of it, anyway.
For a day or two, at least. (There will still be snow on the mountains at the edge of town, a couple of dozen blocks from me, of course.) (Broader view here.)
It led all the network news broadcasts Saturday evening
No, I meant waking up to the news on Friday. Because that’s when it happened. It’s been in the newspapers here since Friday morning. One of the buildings that was demolished was built to 150mph spec; barely a brick was left sitting on another.
And people are now clamoring for stricter mobile-home-building standards, as if that’d have made any difference.
I just hadn’t mentioned it because I’ve been rather distracted with other things. The memorial service I attended on Saturday was full of people I knew who had been better and closer friends to Mike than I had been, so there was lots of reminiscing and discussion later, accompanied by a moderately unwise helping of alcohol.
“It led all the network news broadcasts Saturday evening”
Actually I meant Friday evening, not that it matters.
Awfully sorry to hear about your friend.
(I’ve lived in a variety of places between 181st and Dyckman, myself; Fairview Avenue for a number of years. How are the #1/9 these days?)
No longer extant, actually — it’s back to being just the 1.
OT: A prize-winning Iranian nuclear scientist has probably been assassinated by Israeli intelligence agency Mossad, reports the Sunday Times, citing an intelligence source.
Cleek, you refer to “the Sunday Times”: I’m quite sure that when most folks see or hear those words, they definitely assume you’re talking about the world-famous Pakistani paper, “The Daily Times.” Who doesn’t read it every day?
Cleek, you refer to “the Sunday Times”:
the text in my post is, actually, the first paragraph of the linked article. i neglected to put it in quotes, alas.
“the text in my post is, actually, the first paragraph of the linked article.”
Unless a lot of people are citing it, I won’t bother to point out just how tangled and unreliable the story is (briefly, it goes back to sources in Iranian radio, which also deny that any such thing happened, and that the alleged victim even exists), but I’m wondering if you noticed. (This is not to say the alleged events didn’t happen; that would be impossible to know for sure, at least for now — but the credibility level at the moment is somewhere up their with bigfoot stories.)
Here is the actual Times Online story. It actually comes from the propaganda station the U.S. State Dept. runs to broadcast to Iran, Radio Farda, which cites — and this is where it gets really credible — “Iranian reports.”
So that certainly proves that.
The other source is “Stratfor, the US intelligence company…,” where the cite is to ““very strong intelligence.”
So that establishes that beyond question. What’s to question?
but I’m wondering if you noticed
i noticed there’s no mention anywhere else i usually read. but, that doesn’t always mean the story’s entirely false. so, there’s the link if anyone wants to read it.
i forward links, you decide!