NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC MAGAZINE

April 2004

By Jennifer Ackerman

Symbols of luck and majesty, cranes have been called "wildness incarnate." But with wildness disappearing and their luck running out, the great birds are getting some help from scientists and self-described "craniacs."

Get a taste of what awaits you in print from this compelling excerpt.

From a blind overlooking the wetlands of central Wisconsin, I can see a long-legged bird in the distance, a stroke of white curled at the top, like a bright question mark against the emerald green grasses. Then up pops another from the screen of reeds. The birds are yearlings, five feet (1.5 meters) tall, with snow-white plumage and elegant black wing tips that spread like fingers when they fly. They're quiet now, but from the long trachea coiled in their breastbones may come a wild, singing whoop, harsh and thrilling, that gives their tribe its name.

This would be a primordial scene—big sky, undulations of tall marsh grasses, wild whooping cranes—were it not for a penned area nearby, where several whooper chicks, well camouflaged in tawny feathers, forage in the shallows. In a whisper, crane biologist Richard Urbanek explains that these chicks have been raised in captivity but have never heard a human voice nor seen a human form, except in crane costume. As part of an experimental program to reintroduce a wild migratory population of whooping cranes to the eastern half of North America, these chicks have been fed and tended by crane-costumed people for two months. Now, before they are released to the wild, they are being taught the habits of their ancestors with modern techniques pioneered by Operation Migration, an organization devoted to helping endangered birds learn their traditional migratory routes. Near the pen is a long stretch of open grass, a runway, where the chicks are learning to fly behind an ultralight plane flown by a pilot in crane costume who will guide them from this refuge 1,200 miles (1,900 kilometers) south across seven states to wintering grounds in Florida.

Two cohorts have already made such trips—and returned on their own, the first whooping cranes in perhaps more than a century to fly freely over the eastern United States. After three years of ultralight-led migrations, the new eastern migratory population numbers 36 birds, including the yearlings and the chicks. The success of this effort is leading the way for a more ambitious project half a world away in the northern reaches of Russia. In the fall of next year an international team plans to lead a flock of young captive-bred Siberian cranes along part of their traditional migratory route, from Russia to Iran, to restore the birds' knowledge of the ancient flyway—not with ultralights but with hang gliders that will soar a difficult path extending more than 3,000 miles (5,000 kilometers) over four different countries.

These human-guided migratory flights are among the most recent acts of vigorous intervention to rescue from extinction a singular creature—what conservationist Aldo Leopold called "no mere bird" but "wildness incarnate." For thousands of years cranes have been honored for their beauty, their ancient ancestry, impressive size and flight. In Africa and Europe their image appears in prehistoric art. They figure on Egyptian tombs, in Russian songs, in the totems and clans of Native Americans, in Australian dances, and Greek and Roman myths. In many parts of Asia cranes are held sacred as symbols of happiness, good luck, long life, peace. After the dropping of the bomb that people said was brighter than a thousand suns, a young girl stricken with radiation sickness set out to fold a thousand paper cranes in the hopes that she would recover. She died before reaching her goal, but other children pursued the task, and now the stone monuments of Peace Memorial Park in Hiroshima are ornamented with millions of the tiny folded cranes.

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