The Bluebird Effect

by Julie Zickefoose

  The next spring, as I watched cranes drop to their Platte River roost against a vivid Nebraska sunset, I couldn’t hold it in any longer. The observation platform was crowded with people: young, old, and middle-aged, most from the area, some from as far away as Seattle and Ohio, all come to see the birds, to watch them settle peacefully onto the braided waters of this river. “And to think,” I said not too quietly, “that these birds are shot everywhere else they go.” There was a murmur from the assembled birders.

  I didn’t get any direct response from the birders on the platform, nor did I expect one. They had come to enjoy the cranes and doubtless would rather not think about people who shoot them. I just wanted to plant the concept, to ask them to think about this consumptive use of a species they are content simply to watch. Upon returning home, I decided to learn more about crane hunters. I visited website after website and read article after article, all devoted to the pleasures of killing sandhill cranes. The topper? A Texas outfitter that bills sandhill cranes as “Ribeye in the Sky.” Only in Texas, I thought, could a sandhill crane be so gleefully described as steak on the wing. I looked at the outfitter’s gallery images. All men, all dressed in camouflage, each with a dead crane at his feet or a brace of them dangling by their necks from his fists. They were the kinds of photos you might see in an old book, blurred and black-and-white, except that these were brand-new digital images, in vivid color.

  Now I understood why sandhill cranes in the Central Flyway won’t let you park within gunshot range, why they raise their beautiful heads at the slightest shuffle or scrape in the blind. Why viewing them is best through a powerful spotting scope. They think that we are coming to kill them. It’s brought home to them nearly everywhere they go and gather.

  In the United States, sandhill cranes are legally hunted in Alaska, Arizona, Colorado, Kansas, Minnesota, Montana, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, and Wyoming. In Canada, cranes are hunted in Saskatchewan and Manitoba, and in Mexico, they’re hunted in nine northern and central states. Kansas implemented its season as recently as 1993, Minnesota in 2010. Bag limits vary, but most states have daily limits of three birds per hunter, or a total of six in the hunter’s possession. To be in the presence of these birds, to know that they may have kept the same mate for decades, to know that each one can find its relatives in the throng of birds by voice alone . . . and then to think that in every Central Flyway state where they occur except Nebraska there are hunters setting out decoys, waiting in blinds to shoot them . . . the jagged edges of these thoughts rubbed like broken bones in my mind.

  I couldn’t imagine wanting to shoot sandhill cranes. I suppose I have been so thoroughly inculcated by my experiences huddled in observation blinds with other quietly reverent bird watchers that the notion that someone might wait in a similar blind aiming to kill them had never entered my mind. Clearly, I had to step back from the brink, calm down, and find out how this could be happening.

  So I started to ask questions, things I’d come up with as I tried to wrap my mind around sandhill crane hunting. First was the sustainability of crane hunting—are there enough of the birds to support it, and, more important, is their reproductive rate sufficient to replace harvests? Answering this required some digging, and the Nebraska ornithologist and prolific author Dr. Paul Johnsgard gave me a tremendous amount of information to digest. My concerns, which admittedly had very basic aesthetic and emotional roots, grew.

  From the start, it seemed odd to me to hunt a bird that, if it’s extremely lucky, can raise only two young per year. The vast majority of lesser sandhill cranes with successful nests are able to raise only one “colt” per year. And in fact, the sandhill crane has the lowest recruitment rate of any bird now hunted in North America. Recruitment rate is the percentage of any population that is replaced with new young birds in a given year. Historic recruitment rates of all documented migratory sandhill crane populations have ranged from 7.5 percent to a high of 11.0 percent.

  Over the two decades from 1975 to 1994, the average estimated hunting mortality on the Central Flyway was 21,250 birds annually. By 2010–11, the harvest of midcontinental cranes, including crippling losses, was 38,561 birds, which is a 5 percent increase from the previous year’s estimate. Long-term trends (1982–2008) for the midcontinental population indicate that the harvest has been increasing at a higher rate than population growth. With a three-year average population count of 600,892 cranes, this harvest represents a 6.4 percent take. Texas hunters take the lion’s share (65 percent), followed by North Dakotans. These two states account for 88 percent of the total kill.

  Given the projected recruitment rate, that seemed to me to be cutting it pretty close to the edge. What about all the birds that die from inexperience, disease, natural predation, and accidents? Time will tell whether midcontinental sandhill crane populations can hold up to this harvest.

  Other questions arose, ones that I couldn’t answer by paging through U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service documents. Does anybody eat these things? Who has an oven big enough to roast a crane? Luckily, I have a forum where such questions can be posed and discussed in a respectful and informative way—my blog. A post on the subject in November 2007 caught the attention of some readers who see things differently—people who hunt in order to eat, not necessarily for subsistence but as a way to preserve a connection with wild things and the places where they live.

  In the post and subsequent comments, I pondered the irony that until George Bird Grinnell sounded the alarm, in 1886, millions of birds, including terns, herons, and egrets, were slaughtered for their plumes, which went to decorate women’s hats. Herons and egrets have escaped persecution in ensuing years. Why should cranes come under fire?

  Simply put, they taste good. The writer, falconer, and hunter Matt Mullenix responded: “Sandhill cranes eat grain (at least in winter on the western plains) and their breast meat is dark and rich and tasty as premium beef or elk. I’ve eaten it grilled, which one would expect to dry out any wild bird meat, and yet found it to be juicy and flavorful and indistinguishable in texture from beef.”

  Of all the adjectives I’ve used to describe cranes—intelligent, monogamous, family-oriented, social, prehistoric, and wary among them—one word I’d never considered employing is flavorful. Is it that simple? What if red-tailed hawks—our most abundant raptor—were tasty, too? Would we have seasons and bag limits on them? Mourning doves are said to be delicious, and mourning dove hunting is a hot-button topic in many states. Some call them “songbirds” (which they technically are not) and believe them worthy of protection, while others take pleasure in shooting them as game on the wing. So which is it? Which should it be?

  Let’s say American robins are tasty. They look like they might be (so plump) . . . lots of Europeans eat thrushes. Why shouldn’t we establish a hunting season on robins? They’ve got a great recruitment rate; it’s estimated that there are one hundred newly fledged robins for every ninety-three adults by November 1 each year. In Iceland, Atlantic puffins are sold in the grocery store, wrapped and packed in Styrofoam. They’re probably hard up for protein in Iceland, and they do have a lot more puffins, but as I looked at my “adoption certificate” for a puffin on Eastern Egg Rock hanging on the wall, I had to shudder at the thought of harvesting a sea bird that might still be trying to breed into its thirties. Suddenly, every human judgment about which birds we kill and which we cherish seemed hopelessly arbitrary. I was walking in a minefield, a mental corridor lined with species both hunted and protected, passing in and out of the light of reason, trying not to hit the tripwires of anger and emotion.

  And then other hunters and conservationists joined the polite fray in my blog comments section, and my thoughts about hunting took a turn. They pointed out the direct link between hunting and habitat acquisition, a link that has yet to be firmly established with recreational birding.

  Here’s the system: a hunter who wishes to shoot sandhill cranes must first purchase a hunting lic
ense in his or her state—at a cost of anywhere from thirteen to thirty-two dollars. A Federal Migratory Bird Hunting and Conservation Stamp, commonly known as a Duck Stamp (fifteen dollars), is currently not required to hunt cranes. A free Harvest Information Program (HIP) certification is required. This makes it possible for hunters to report just what they’ve killed, in part to help state game agencies set bag limits in coming seasons. Some states require additional permits to hunt cranes; North Dakota, for example, charges five dollars. So someone who wants to hunt cranes (or ducks, for that matter) might pay in the neighborhood of thirteen to thirty-eight dollars yearly for the privilege.

  What would you be willing to pay if you needed permits to watch birds? Of course, anyone can watch birds; it’s free, and it should be free. Or should it?

  The Duck Stamp is a license to hunt wetland waterfowl. It is also the single most direct conversion of money to wetland acquisition going. It is these hunting licenses, plus a tax placed on guns, ammunition, and other gear by the 1937 Pittman-Robertson Act, that have purchased and protected more than 5.2 million acres of wetland habitat, not only for ducks but for sandhill cranes, turtles, muskrats, yellowthroats, and dragonflies, too.

  And it is here that hunters hold the economic, if not the aesthetic, high ground (though Matthew Mullenix, Stephen Bodio, and others write so eloquently of the beauty of feeding oneself with a gun or hunting falcon that that point could be argued, too). Hunter contribution to habitat acquisition is not only mandatory but also voluntary. Ducks Unlimited, a private organization, has raised $162 million, 80 percent of that going to the protection of 82 million acres in three countries.

  Where does that leave bird watchers, notorious for our quest for free entertainment, other than in the dust? Well, I’m not sure. How many of us join Ducks Unlimited? Or is that organization just for hunters? And how many of us buy Duck Stamps each year and proudly paste them right on our binoculars? Or is that just for hunters, too? Is habitat acquisition just too much for us to bother with, because we know that somebody else will worry about it? Isn’t it time we stepped up to the plate, too? Whether we admit it or not, birders benefit greatly from the conservation dollars contributed by hunters. We watch the birds they’ve saved, standing on habitat they’ve bought.

  The economic contribution of passive wildlife watchers to habitat acquisition and maintenance is difficult to track, since there is as yet no tax on birding and photographic equipment such as was imposed on hunting gear by the Pittman-Robertson Act. Bird watchers are not required to purchase Duck Stamps in order to pursue their quarry, though an increasing number are doing just that. Though my husband and I buy Duck Stamps each year and display them on our binoculars, for all intents and purposes the credit for our yearly investment goes to hunters.

  And yet bird watchers, wildlife photographers, and passive wildlife watchers are growing in number even as hunting license sales decline. The explosion in digital photography, making it possible for even pikers like me to take and distribute acceptable bird images, allows many more people to stalk wildlife without harming it. Some figures place expenditures by wildlife watchers outpacing those by hunters six to one.

  The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service estimates that thirty-three states saw declines in hunting license sales over the past two decades. Massachusetts alone has seen a 50 percent falloff in hunting license sales in that period.

  With mounting interest in nonconsumptive wildlife watching outpacing recruitment of new hunters, it is a particularly sensitive time for Eastern Flyway states to propose new hunting seasons on sandhill cranes, but Tennessee, Kentucky, and Wisconsin are doing just that. Tennessee was the first, proposing its season in the winter of 2010. This, after having planted crops that feed the cranes and holding a festival celebrating them on its Hiwassee Wildlife Refuge for seventeen years. Around fourteen to twenty thousand of the big gray birds flock there each year, and about that many people come each year just to watch them fly over, to hear their calls, to see them go to roost and rise again in the morning.

  Word was slow getting out to the birding community about Tennessee’s proposed hunt, but when it did, thousands of letters and e-mails protesting the hunt deluged Tennessee’s Wildlife Resources Commission offices. The public packed TWRC’s meeting in January 2011, voicing opposition. The notion of once again opening season on a bird that had been hunted nearly to extinction in the East did not sit well with bird watchers, or with a good number of hunters. Opponents of the hunt pointed out weaknesses in data gathering (winter counts are all done by volunteers, and loosely coordinated) and the hazy overall picture of the population status of Eastern Flyway birds, along with voicing their concern over potential collateral kill of endangered whooping cranes, which travel in sandhill crane flocks. Tennessee responded to the outcry by tabling its crane hunting proposal until 2012, citing a need for more data.

  Hoping to make Kentucky the first Eastern Flyway state to open season on cranes, that state’s Department of Fish and Wildlife announced its proposed season in December 2010. Once again, a storm of protest ensued, prompting Kentucky to put forward a reduced season, allowing four hundred permit holders up to two cranes each and carefully timing the season to avoid migration periods for whooping cranes. The season was approved by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in August 2011.

  Sandhill cranes are a touchstone species for many, stirring something primeval in the souls of those who watch them gather, swirl overhead, and dance. The proposal to hunt them in the East, when they are just becoming common enough to gather in good numbers and be seen on migration, has caused many to question the sovereignty of their state wildlife departments. How can it be that, as in Kentucky, a nine-member commission, elected solely by holders of hunting and fishing licenses, is given the power to declare the sandhill crane a game bird and propose seasons and bag limits? How can it be that Kentucky birders and wildlife enthusiasts, who by a 2006 National Survey of Fishing, Hunting, and Wildlife-Associated Recreation, now outnumber hunters 1.5 million to 820,000, have no say over the birds’ fate other than to write and call the KDFW in protest? Three hundred and thirty-seven people wrote USFWS in protest. Petitions with 3,000 signatures demanding the hunt proposal be withdrawn also arrived at USFWS offices. No letters supporting the Kentucky hunt were received. There is something very odd about this picture.

  There are enough cranes around now to hunt some, run the states’ arguments. Hunters should be given the opportunity to bag a new species if there are enough of the birds to support hunting. Wildlife managers state that crane populations will not be adversely affected; in Tennessee, state officials assured bird watchers that crane-viewing opportunities would be enhanced by hunting, since it would drive wintering birds from private land onto the already densely populated Hiwassee Refuge. But would such concentration be good for the cranes? And would bird watchers be happy to see bigger flocks of cranes, knowing that the birds they enjoy were fleeing hunters just outside the refuge? Does the simple fact that there are enough to shoot some mean they must be shot?

  The struggle over crane hunting in the eastern states has cast into sharp light the division between consumptive and nonconsumptive wildlife enthusiasts. It seems odd and deliberately divisive to push hunting of a charismatic species like a crane at a time when wildlife watchers outnumber consumptive wildlife enthusiasts and are actively seeking ways to contribute to habitat acquisition and conservation. Try as I might, I can’t cram the lanky four-foot length of a sandhill crane into the slot in my brain marked “Game Species.” They’re huge, slow-flying, and vulnerable; they reproduce very slowly, with only one-third of breeding pairs managing to produce one colt per year. That youngster is still heavily dependent on its parents for guidance in its first winter of life, yet states are proposing to let hunters shoot into and shatter those family units. For sport, for fun. For food, if they have enough strong marinade.

  Should we be marinating the meat of sandhill cranes? Or should we be looking up at them alive and fl
ying, our heads thrown back in wonder, gratitude, and awe? Shouldn’t we be searching their cloud gray numbers for the big white cranes who travel with them, and are at risk of being shot, their precious genes squandered in the mud of a cornfield?

  People who believe strongly in their perceived right to hunt whatever they wish can be persuasive in characterizing birders and wildlife watchers as sentimental and silly for having an emotional connection to birds and animals, for being guided by heart and not head. I believe that it is desirable to hold some species sacred. I feel that way about sandhill cranes because I have observed, from Nebraska to New Mexico, from Michigan to Ohio, that to the many thousands of people who are moved by them, they are potent ambassadors for wild things and wild places. These are not necessarily birders, just ordinary people who are stirred by the sight and sound of cranes. Is a crane worth more alive than dead? Just ask the director of the Lillian Annette Rowe Sanctuary on Nebraska’s Platte River, where crane tourism draws fifteen thousand visitors from all fifty states and forty-six foreign countries, bringing more than $10 million into the local economy every year. All without firing a single shot. Alive and flying wingtip to wingtip with their families, purring sonorously, cranes awaken the untamed places in our hearts.

  Despite an aggressive Internet information campaign, very few of the birders with whom I’ve spoken personally since I found out the truth about sandhill cranes were aware that they are a hunted species, and that they are now a game species in the East. Perhaps I’ve had a skewed sample, but I’ve been surprised at our collective ignorance. Crane hunting has been a hard thing for me to grasp, an even harder thing to accept, as if something sacred is being violated when such a long-lived, truly prehistoric bird is killed. And yet dedicated hunters feel that there is something sacred in their pursuit of and ultimate primal connection with—nourishing their bodies—their prey, something just as ancient and stirring as the rolling purr of a crane overhead. I can’t deny them that just because it offends my sensibilities. And in a time when sustainability and animal cruelty are coming to the forefront of many people’s thoughts about the food industry, Matt Mullenix’s views resonate with me. “There is hardly a more humane ‘ranching technique’ than letting animals alone to do as they please, feeding and breeding in good habitat until the very last second of their lives. No suffering from confinement or poor husbandry. What could make better meat than that?”