by Jon Mooallem
PART THREE
BIRDS
11.
CONSTRUCTION WORKERS
By the late 1940s, there were only about thirty whooping cranes left on Earth, and, for better or worse, America was about to level the clobbering weight of its attention on two of them.
Their names were Pete and Josephine, and they had been paired up at the Audubon Zoo in New Orleans so that they might breed. Pete and Josephine were not breeding, though, probably because the zoo’s spectacularly ignorant superintendent, George Douglass, had confined the towering, long-legged birds to a pen hardly big enough for ducks, then stashed them in a noisy backyard, near the garbage, where they had rats to contend with, little shade to escape the heat, and only washtubs of dirty water to drink from—all of it hewing away at the whooping cranes’ physical and mental health.
Pete, the male bird, seemed especially anxious—“hysterical,” one visitor said. The crane had been a member of what was, by then, the only remaining wild flock of whooping cranes in the world. But in 1936, it was shot in the wing and left for dead while making one of its cohort’s annual migrations between the Gulf Coast of Texas and a remote region of Alberta, Canada. Young sisters in Nebraska, out riding their bicycles, spotted Pete downed in a field and fetched their father, who bagged him. For the next twelve years, Pete would serve as a mascot for a local gun club. He could not fly and was missing one eye.
The crane that Pete had been shipped to New Orleans to mate with, Josephine, was the sole survivor of an encampment of whooping cranes that had once lived in southwestern Louisiana. One old-timer would remember, “It was beautiful to see them up there in the sky, always seven or eight in a bunch, circling and crossing each other like people square dancing.” But by 1941, the Louisiana flock had almost entirely petered out. That fall, Josephine was discovered injured in a rice field and delivered to the zoo in New Orleans. That left only twenty-two whooping cranes in the wild. It would prove to be the all-time low for the species. Some people claim it was worse, that there were actually only fifteen whooping cranes left. Or fourteen. Others say twenty-one. It’s one of many details, I would discover, that people who love the whooping crane can’t agree on.
In fact, one writer notes, it wasn’t long before Pete and Josephine’s predicament in New Orleans incited a “head-on collision” of “two groups of people, both passionate about whooping cranes and passionately opposed to each other on the question of how to preserve them.” The fury kicked off in 1948, when Robert Porter Allen visited the two cranes at the zoo. Allen was an ornithologist who was going to tremendous lengths to revive the species in the wild. Seeing the conditions there, Allen pleaded with George Douglass at least to feed the whooping cranes live blue crabs, which is what whooping cranes like to eat in the wild. Douglass had no background in animals whatsoever, and had been put in charge of the zoo through cronyism, it seems, after dropping out of college and working for his father at the city’s waterworks. He asked Allen if blue crabs were “anything like” soft-shell crabs. Then, while Allen stood there horrified, Douglass phoned a local restaurant and ordered some for the birds. In an outraged letter to officials in Washington, Allen described the two whooping cranes as not living, but “merely existing.” “The species has suffered much,” he wrote, “but those two birds represent the lowest rung. I could have wept when I saw them, if I hadn’t been so numb with anger and shame.”
The whooping crane stands five feet tall, with a wingspan as long as eight feet. It is the tallest North American bird—a sixty-million-year-old species and one of the few living relics of all that vanished, Pleistocene-era megafauna. As salivating dire wolves and two-hundred-pound beavers plodded around America, the whooping crane stood poised in shallow wetlands, playing the long game. The bird is reclusive and headstrong, and believed to require a full square mile around its nest all to itself. So, as humans crowded into North America, then started draining the swamps where it lived for agriculture, the whooping crane couldn’t easily adapt. The bird’s size, elusiveness, and pure white feathers also made it a satisfying target for hunters—as did its abrasive bugling, which can carry for several miles. The species was rumored to be extinct many times. A 1904 Washington Post headline read: “Two Nebraska Hunters Kill the Last of the Pompous Bird.”
Before European settlement, more than ten thousand whooping cranes lived across North America, from Utah to New Jersey. But the die-off of the Louisiana population in the 1940s left only one wild flock—the twenty-two birds, or however many, that wintered on the marshes in Texas and flew to Canada every spring to breed. As the number of cranes returning to Texas every fall dipped and rose slightly, the tally was reported in major newspapers around the country. Like William Temple Hornaday’s buffalo a few generations earlier, the whooping crane gained an anxious mystique. It was a wonderful animal that would soon be gone and, because it would soon be gone, it seemed more wonderful. The bird’s wildness—its majestic ambivalence; the insolence, even, which it showed the human race—became its signature virtue, the thing that people who celebrate whooping cranes still celebrate the most. “This is a bird,” Robert Porter Allen wrote, “that cannot compromise or adjust its way of life to ours. Could not by its very nature; could not even if we had allowed it the opportunity, which we did not. . . . Without meekness, without a sign of humility, it has refused to accept our idea of what the World should be like.”
It wasn’t easy, but Allen eventually wrestled Pete and Josephine away from George Douglass. The cranes were brought to a large outdoor enclosure at the Aransas National Wildlife Refuge in Texas, the marshes where the last wild flock spent the winter. There the situation improved—sort of. In the summer of 1949, Josephine laid two eggs. They were the first whooping crane eggs ever laid in captivity. But a few days later, Josephine and Pete inexplicably smashed both eggs to pieces. Then Pete died. Before long, George Douglass got in a truck, drove to Aransas, walked into the refuge manager’s office, and said, “I’ve come to get my bird.” Then he stuffed Josephine in the truck, along with her new mate, a male crane named Crip, and drove them back to New Orleans.
In New Orleans, Josephine eventually laid another egg. But Douglass, no doubt feeling that he’d performed a miracle and wanting credit for it, brought in a rabble of reporters and photographers. One of the men jabbed a stick into the cage—he thought it would be neat to taunt the cranes, apparently—and Crip, defending his nest, accidentally trampled the egg and destroyed it.
At that point, there were twenty-one whooping cranes on Earth. The situation looked hopeless. The New York Times blamed the species’ looming extinction on its own “lack of cooperation.”
—
SINCE THEN, generations of conservationists and government employees have collaborated to protect that last remaining wild flock of whooping cranes. The handful of birds that were left in the 1940s have rebounded into a population of about 275 today. This stands as one of the most extraordinary turnarounds in conservation history, and one of the most backbreaking. The cranes’ winter and summer habitats in Texas and Alberta have been shielded from all kinds of intrusions and threats. Disputes have metastasized into lawsuits. Individual cranes, found injured along the migratory route, have been airlifted to veterinarians, and during droughts in Texas, the government has fed the cranes corn, apparently settling for itself all the same philosophical questions that I’d watched calls to feed polar bears raise in Churchill, after the video of those starving cubs got out.
Watching the effort to keep the Lange’s metalmark flying at Antioch Dunes, I sometimes wondered what that management would look like in thirty or fifty years. The ecology around the butterfly—all the natural machinery supporting it—was basically gone. Still, it seemed likely that the Lange’s could keep coasting along at its current listless clip indefinitely, as long as we stood behind it, pushing.
Turning to the whooping crane is like time-traveling nearly a century into that future. Once, in the days of Pete and Josephine, we’d bac
ked the ancient bird into the same sort of squalid and discouraging corner that the butterfly is in now. But then we kept it from dying out. And we kept keeping it from dying out. And as each generation lessened, but never solved, the crane’s many problems, then entrusted those problems to the next generation, we avoided the permanent dead end of its extinction—and as long as we avoided that, we kept alive all other possibilities for the bird.
The whooping crane has been the beneficiary of such intensive, progressively more bizarre and intimate human intervention that, even by the time it was listed as one of the first protected species under a precursor to the modern Endangered Species Act, in 1967, it was already a recognizable symbol of the greater cause of conservation. Now those working on the latest phase of the recovery are building creatively on that long legacy of hard work. And the crane is beginning to symbolize something else: the reaches of what’s possible—how, even when such effort looks foolish or futile through the pinhole of the present, its value in the long term is unknowable.
—
AS A KID, Joe Duff couldn’t have guessed that the whooping crane would make it this far—and he never imagined that he’d be working to help the bird, either. Joe was born in 1949, the year when Pete and Josephine smashed their eggs at Aransas. He grew up in Ontario, Canada, and remembers hearing about the whooping crane his entire childhood. One day, his mother insisted there was a whooping crane by the creek behind their house. But Joe had just read an article about whooping cranes in National Geographic and remembers thinking that, with only twenty of these things in the whole world, one couldn’t possibly be behind his house in Ontario. (In fact, one wasn’t behind his house: the bird turned out to be a heron—it wasn’t even white—but Joe wasn’t in the habit of telling his mother she was wrong.) Joe liked birds and nature as a kid. But what he really loved was cars. And also art. By the time he was thirty-three, he owned his own commercial photography studio in downtown Toronto and specialized in photographing automobiles for ads and dealership brochures. He shot foreign luxury cars on the winding roads of Big Sur and commanded a rate of $2,000 or $3,000 a day. He went to a lot of parties. When he needed a root canal on one of his front teeth, he convinced a dentist to give him a cap with a small copper star inlaid on the front—still visible when he smiles. The star seemed flashy and hip at the time, but now Joe, at age sixty-one, brushes off the inevitable questions about it by saying, a little embarrassedly, “It’s from a former life.”
The other thing that Joe did in those days was fall in love with ultralights—a kind of very tiny airplane. An ultralight, sometimes called a trike, has an open cockpit and looks like a little amusement-park race car dangling from the wing of a hang glider. It’s powered by a massive propeller in the back. The pilot steers by shifting a bar under the wing with his arms. Ultralights were not especially safe back then, and still aren’t, to some extent. But flying them was exhilarating and attracted a subculture of sometimes reckless or mildly self-destructive pilots. It was frivolous, maybe. But it was under the wing of an ultralight that Joe’s life sailed into its improbably altruistic second act, and into the realm of the whooping crane. “Now,” he told me, “I can’t think of anything more useless than the car catalogs I used to produce.”
Joe now heads a nonprofit called Operation Migration, part of a coalition of amateurs, biologists, and government agencies that has been trying, for more than a decade, to create a second population of wild whooping cranes in America, basically from scratch. Maybe it’s a sign of how low the bar has sunk in conservation, but even one of the field’s most celebrated successes—the resurgence of that western flock of whooping cranes, from fifteen to almost three hundred birds—still doesn’t give solid odds for the species’ long-term survival. And so conservationists are now breeding birds in captivity, releasing them in Wisconsin, and laboring to get them migrating to Florida along a flyway that whooping cranes haven’t traveled for more than a century. That is, the whooping crane recovery has advanced from conservation—keeping the last scraps of a species in place—to restoration, actually expanding the animal’s presence in the world.
Operation Migration uses ultralight planes to teach the cranes to migrate along that new route. Traditionally, and for many millennia, whooping cranes learned to migrate from their parents; the route was passed from generation to generation. Unlike other birds, whooping cranes aren’t colonial—a so-called flock doesn’t fly south all at once, and juveniles aren’t inclined to follow, or even associate with, older birds that aren’t their parents. Instead, cranes travel with their mates or in nuclear families. In the fall, a male and female will guide only the chick they fledged the previous spring on its first migration. That one trip is enough to teach the young bird the way.
But the cranes being released in Wisconsin have been carefully bred from animals living in captivity. They hatch at the Patuxent Wildlife Research Center, a government lab in Maryland. In other words, they’re plopped down in the wild without parents—they have no guides. The trikes act as a surrogate parent, flying ahead of a group of cranes, which have been trained, since birth, to follow them. As in nature, with real crane parents, it takes only one journey south behind an airplane for the birds to learn the way. After that, they will migrate back and forth independently for the rest of their lives and eventually teach their own offspring. Meanwhile, the ultralights move on to lead the next class of government-issued chicks—incrementally, and artificially, building up a population that acts like a wild one.
However, because the goal is to produce birds that, once released, will retain the majesty and uncompromising wildness that makes the whooping crane the whooping crane, those engineering this new population had to find a way to step in as surrogate parents and train the birds without wearing away the cranes’ apprehension of people. Working with them too intimately would produce whooping cranes that feel comfortable hanging out in schoolyards, or in the fetid little ponds around retirement communities; it would plague America with a race of whooping cranes that are hardly wild or majestic but are more like the geese loitering on suburban soccer fields—except that, as Joe points out, a goose doesn’t jump into the air and rake forward with its long talons when it feels cornered.
And so, to keep the birds wild, every effort is made, from the time the chicks hatch in Maryland and for the rest of their lives, to prevent them from encountering even the slightest sign of humans. No one who works with the cranes is ever allowed to say a word around them. And everyone wears identical white costumes: a long, frumpy gown and white hooded helmet with mesh covering the face. (All together, it resembles a bee-keeping suit crossed with a Ku Klux Klan getup.) They also wear a crane-head puppet on one hand, which they use to show the chicks how to peck and forage. The crane bonds to the white costume, just as a chick would to its parents in the wild—trusting and readily following it around. Scientists call the process “imprinting.”
After a couple of months, the cranes are shipped from Maryland to Wisconsin, where Joe and Operation Migration’s other two trike pilots—all wearing the same white whooping crane costumes, working the same puppets, and abiding by the same monastic vow of silence around the birds—put them through a summer of flight training. Back in Maryland, the newborn chicks were played recordings of an ultralight engine, sometimes while still inside their eggs, and attuned to it as a pseudo-parental presence. Now, hearing that sound again, and drawn to the costumed pilot in the cockpit, they eagerly scuttle behind a trike as it taxis on the ground. Eventually, they scramble into the air and learn to form a line behind the wing. The birds take longer and longer practice flights, spreading behind the airplane in a lopsided or often one-sided V. Then, in the fall, everyone sets out for Florida: the trikes and the cranes, a Cessna flying above them as a spotter, and an entourage of motor homes and support vehicles spooling along the highways below.
The caravan hopscotches from one pre-scouted stopover point to the next, keeping up the same wordless, costumed charade around th
e cranes the entire way. The birds are transferred clandestinely, priceless works of art. From the time they land at each stopover to the time they can take off again, they’re stashed in a portable camouflaged pen, tucked out of view, and ringed by an electric fence. Costumed workers feed them twice a day, but otherwise the area is off-limits and resolutely shielded from trespassers, hunters, whooping crane lovers, journalists, and dogs.
I set out to follow one autumn’s migration. And it was only when I got on the ground that I realized that the journey was even less straightforward than it sounds. This work—this wholesale manufacture of wild birds by human beings—turns out to be so ambitious, tedious, and packed with perplexing arcana that, after ten years, it’s hard for those who have given their lives to the project even to agree on how well it’s working and what they should do next. Under the surface, I’d find a simmering clash of theory and practice—and also a clash of personalities: the artists and scientists, vagabonds and bureaucrats that had thrown themselves together into the sort of improbable partnership that is capable of conceiving and pulling off something so bizarre, if it wasn’t first swallowed by its own eccentricities. As in the time of Robert Porter Allen and George Douglass, the fate of the whooping crane hinged on the cooperation of very dissimilar people, the volatility of their individual spirits, and the resilience of their wills. At some point that fall, I would lose interest in the legendary wildness of whooping cranes and wind up wonderstruck, instead, by the wildness of human beings—whatever unfathomable force inside us that had once nearly destroyed the bird and was now beating just as uncontrollably in a cockpit at the front of the flock.
The journey from Wisconsin to Florida is 1,285 miles long. Many times, Operation Migration has left in the middle of October and not reached the end until late January. It’s a sluggish, sometimes maddening way to travel the length of America—so baldly inefficient, so crazy-seeming on its face that, I’d notice, it often needs to be explained multiple times to the greasy-spoon cashiers and gas station attendants that Operation Migration encounters along the way. It’s hard to believe. Already it’s come to this on Planet Earth: men dressed like birds, teaching birds to fly.
