whooping cranes

Operation Migration (OM) was visionary. Simply put, it was the first time our species attempted to teach another species a lost behavior.  OM was founded by Canadians Bill Lishman and Joe Duff and their labor intensive protocol actually worked, beautifully.

Unlike hummingbirds, whooping cranes are born with the desire to migrate south for the winter but are clueless just where to go. OM envisioned and taught young whooping crane colts to adopt ultralight aircraft as parents. Each year beginning in 2000, the young leggy birds then followed the small aircraft from Wisconsin to Florida. The next spring the cranes returned north, unaided.

During the early part of the new millennium, I became involved, first as a casual bystander and then an active volunteer in the effort. And for the first time in nearly one hundred years watched as whooping cranes migrated through East Tennessee. I generally saw them at TWRA's Hiwassee Wildlife Refuge because the cranes were taught that the refuge north of Chattanooga was a safe haven, a good place to spend the night during migration.

Over the years, Ijams' Paul James and I traveled to Patuxent Research Refuge in Maryland, Necedah Wildlife Refuge and the International Crane Foundation both in Wisconsin plus, in 2007, America's first wildlife safe haven, the Aransas National Wildlife Refuge on the Gulf Coast of Texas. We met many of the people dedicated to the whooping crane recovery effort.

It was all extremely memorable. 

Hiwassee Wildlife Refuge. Three ultralights overhead

Following OM ultralight into Hiwassee Wildlife Refuge, 2004

Following OM ultralight into Hiwassee Wildlife Refuge, 2004

Mated pair of whooping cranes at the International Crane Foundation, 2005

Ijams' Pam Petko-Seus and Paul James with ICF co-founder George Archibald, 2005

Whooping crane at the International Crane Foundation, Baraboo, Wisconsin, 2006

OM's co-founder and chief pilot Joe Duff greets Morristown middle school teacher and her students, 2005

"Do you know how to clean mud?" It was an odd question but the caller, Vickie Henderson, was indeed serious. I had been a part of Ijams' River Rescue for years, but what we did was pick up trash along the shorelines of the rivers and lakes in and around Knoxville. We never actually cleaned the mud itself.   

Turns out that while the young whooping cranes were on the ground at TWRA's Hiwassee Wildlife Refuge they were kept safe corralled in a temporary holding pen on the muddy shoreline. And cranes being cranes, they'd probe the mud looking for edibles but were finding buried detritus of our trash producing culture. Broken pieces of beer bottles, cans, pop-tops, all matter of things.

"Well Vickie, I think we will need rubber boots, rakes and shovels," I said. "And it is probably not going to be easy." Thus I became an Operation Migration volunteer. 

The first year, 2003, Vickie and I raked through the mud ourselves and it took hours. In the years that followed we recruited other volunteers to help and Charlie Robinson even brought a metal detector.

 The pen itself where the cranes spent their time at Hiwassee.

The pen clean-up crew at Hiwassee, 2004

The pen clean up crew at Hiwassee, 2005

Some of the trash found in the mud inside the whooping crane holding pen at Hiwassee, 2005.