Watching Whooping Cranes
Violet Snow
October 23, 2009 I’m getting addicted to the cranecam. Since visiting Necedah Wildlife Refuge in Wisconsin, I’m intrigued by the effort to teach young whooping cranes, an endangered species, to migrate by getting them to follow ultralight aircraft. Also, I’m hoping to write an article about the cranes.
The pilots work for Operation Migration, the same outfit that inspired the movie “Fly Away Home”, wherein orphaned Canada geese were led south by ultralights (known as “trikes” because they have three wheels). Cranes, however, are more finicky than geese, and the weather this year has restricted their training time. The team has gotten about half the 20 birds to their first stopover location, but rain and “trashy” conditions—turbulence—have kept the rest on the ground. Today they’re trying again.
When I get to the computer and click on the streaming video feed, the trikes are already in the air, and pilot Joe Duff is leading, trying to get the birds in formation. They fly around in big circles, the cranes surge ahead and Joe has to scoot over them to regain the lead. One laggard has remained on the ground and is now flying against the side of the pen, upset. A hulking figure covered in a brown sheet lumbers along the grass runway next to the pen,. This is the Swamp Monster, the chat next to the cranecam screen informs us, out there to prevent the cranes from landing.
Little keyword-prompted ads pop up annoyingly from time to time beneath the cam screen: subscribe to Mother Earth News, go on a wildlife expedition, rent a construction crane—all sizes available.
There are 247 viewers watching this morning, and another 116 on the trikecam, a camera attached to Chris Gullikson’s plane. (But I suspect that most of them, like me, are logged onto both simultaneously.) A message from Joe breaks into the chat: the air above the stopover is trashy, and they’re heading back to the pen.
The young cranes land gracefully on the runway, two trikes settling beside them. Joe and Chris climb out of their planes, dressed in the baggy white crane costumes that all handlers wear, to prevent the cranes from imprinting on humans. The hooded men look like beekeepers, except that their outfits are more like dresses that end in muddy hems. Their crane-head hand puppets peck gently at the birds, herding them into the pen. The men’s pace is decisive but unhurried, with no jerky movements.
The planes—really just motorized gliders—take off again, and it looks so easy, not much different from starting a car, but UP IN THE AIR, they’re FLYING, and I find myself wishing…but I know, from meeting Joe last week, that theirs is a stressful job, requiring infinite patience.
I’ll have to get to the computer a little earlier tomorrow to watch the roundup, if the weather is good. Here’s the link, if you want to watch, and it will take them many weeks to get to Florida, with a cam running most days:
http://www.operationmigration.org/crane-cam.html
Tags: Whooping Cranes , Migration , Endangered Species
