If you’ve explored Wisconsin’s wetlands, you’ve probably come across one of two tall birds — the sandhill crane or the whooping crane.
Sandhill cranes were on the brink of extinction just a century ago. Now there are over 100,000 of them and nearly half call Wisconsin home.
Studying this rebound has helped the International Crane Foundation restore whooping crane populations in North America. However, they’re still an endangered species with about 800 of the birds in the world.
For this month’s Chirp Chat, Lake Effect’s Xcaret Nuñez spoke with Anne Lacy, the Director of Eastern Flyway Programs in North America for the International Crane Foundation.
What makes Baraboo, Wisconsin a great place for cranes?
It just happens to be that one of our co-founders [Ron Sauey] is from Baraboo, but this is also the middle of sandhill crane habitat! So it's really perfect to showcase the family of cranes and to have examples in the wild, literally right down the road, in the case of whooping cranes and sandhill cranes. So they're only two species of 15 that exist in North America and we have them both (sandhill cranes and whooping cranes) right here in Sauk County.
How has the ICF helped recover sandhill crane populations?
We didn’t have to do a thing. By the time the International Crane Foundation started in 1973, sandhill cranes were well on their way to recovery. So our focus was really on other crane species worldwide that were in grave danger of going extinct — the whooping crane being one here in North America. But there were other crane species at that time that we really didn't even know their status.
We did want to study the sandhill cranes though because it helped inform us about other species. But because a species, crane, or otherwise, is doing well, that doesn't mean that we should be like, “Okay, we're done. We can ignore this now, and we can move on to something else.” Because, if you turn your back, something might happen — something that would cause a decline in the species.
Species like cranes that are long-lived but slow to reproduce, once it starts a decline, what caused it has been happening for long enough that it might be too difficult to stop that momentum. And so that's why I love that we are studying sandhill cranes here in Wisconsin because we do not want that to happen again.
Is it true that people at ICF dress up as cranes to raise whooping cranes?
They do dress up as cranes! For our whooping crane work, our agriculturists here and other captive centers that we work with, don a crane costume, but it is not to look like cranes. It is to cover the human form.
So on one arm, they have a crane puppet, and that looks like the head of a whooping crane, and that's really what we want the chicks that they're raising to focus on. So that is very specific to reintroduction, because we don't have enough whooping cranes in captivity that can raise a whooping crane for release out into the wild.
[Whooping cranes], of course, in the wild, unfortunately, are not self-sustaining yet, so we need to raise birds in captivity and keep amending these populations until we get to a point where they are self-sustaining. And a good way to do that is to raise many chicks at once with human caretakers. But we don't want young whooping crane chicks to imprint on people, so when we put them out in the wild, they act like wild birds, and they do.
So it's kind of weird, but it is really ingenious, and that just really makes a great point about the ingenuity that it takes to recover a species and the lengths that we go to.
You know, famously, these birds were taught the migration route from Wisconsin down to Florida by an ultralight plane. That is really some creative thinking. And it absolutely worked and now we have birds that are flying all the time, and we can now release these birds that we raise into the company of adult birds to follow down and learn that route.
What are some challenges sandhill cranes face?
The biggest challenge to our Wisconsin [sandhill crane] population is themselves and the crop damage that they do. We helped develop a deterrent [called Avipel] to keep cranes from damaging sprouting corn seeds, because they will go in and they will pluck out the corn seeds as they're as they're sprouting. They can do a lot of damage to a cornfield, and that's an economic hit [to the farmer].
So we helped develop this seed treatment, and it works. It's very effective. It takes that one thing off the menu. Cranes are omnivores and we just don't want them eating that one thing — they can eat the bugs and the waste grain, and there's, there's tons of other things in a field for them to eat.
It's also very, very difficult to convince a crane that they don't want to be there. If it's a territorial pair, especially with a chick, they cannot go anywhere. Non-breeding flocks, which can do the most damage as they meander about the landscape, but you also don't want to scare them away and make it a problem for your neighbors or another field that you own. So a lot of the work that we do, just knowing cranes and their ecology really helped inform this effective solution.
What are some challenges whooping cranes face?
Thinking specifically about whooping cranes, right now, the biggest hurdle is figuring out the impediments to them breeding successfully.
There's lots of reasons that a young chick will not make it. There's disease issues. Genetics, you never know when a bad gene is going to rear its head, and they just literally have failure to thrive. But we also have a lot of predators here in Wisconsin, avian and mammal of varying sizes. So right now that is still our biggest hurdle — figuring out what is keeping the wild population that is established in Wisconsin from breeding.
We have a lot of pairs that are well established, they nest year after year, and they can't quite seem to have their chicks survive the 100 days it takes to fledge. Once they fledge, then the survival probability goes way up, because, of course, they can fly away from things. It just makes them a lot safer.
So that's a really big focus for us right now.
You were recently appointed to the council of a Wisconsin legislature study on sandhill cranes. Can you tell me about this legislative study committee?
This study committee is just for this fall and it stems pretty directly from the crop damage problem.
So maybe as a result of the issue with sandhill cranes and crop damage, and it's very obvious that we have a very robust sandal crane population in Wisconsin, they are hunted elsewhere.
It’s been years and years and years of discussions and hunting proposals coming up in the legislature, and never going very far. So it's finally come to this legislative study committee being created to look into this, to bring all parties [together].
There’s not even two sides. There are many sides. There's the agricultural side, there's the ecological side, there's the birding community and the hunting side. This is a resource that means different things to all of those sides.
So I hope the study committee, that I did apply to be a part of and very thankful to be on it, I'm hoping the study committee will finally [lay out] all the facts and the figures. The population [of sandhill cranes] is very healthy, maybe even 40 to 50,000 residents in Wisconsin alone. But again, over 100,000 in the entire population. But cranes are not deer, they're not geese, they're not ducks.
The ecology of this species is very, very different from other hunted species, and the fact that this is a breeding area for sandhill cranes is something that I believe is not well known outside of the crane ecology world. And I think that is one thing that I really want to have deeper discussions about with people, so they know that hunting a species that is not very numerous — and we're talking not very numerous in comparison to other waterfowl — is not good. Especially because these birds live long but are slow to breed, that is really key.
There's a lot of information that we need about this population. So to me, it's a very, very big issue, thinking about all of these different sides, and how everybody is impacted. How to please everybody, that's not ever possible, but to try to do what's best for the cranes, that's my job as I see it. So I'm really taking this slow and thoughtful, absolutely.
Chirp Chat’s Bird of the Month for July
Harold and Periwinkle – Blue Cranes
Lacy says the International Crane Foundation’s resident blue cranes, Harold and Periwinkle, are raising a sandhill crane chick named Calypso. In this case, the ICF is using cross-fostering to help the two blue cranes struggling with fertility prepare for parenthood.
“When [Calypso] hatched out of its egg and was placed in with Howard and Periwinkle, they didn't know that it wasn't their egg,” Lacy says. “They had been sitting on an infertile egg. So we're encouraging this pair and their parental activities to build their confidence as a pair, in hopes that someday they will have a fertile egg of their own.”
The new family will be on exhibit for a limited time this summer. Calypso will later be moved to a different enclosure with adult sandhill cranes so they can serve as role models to her.
The ICF is focused on maintaining the blue crane population. The species is considered vulnerable by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. It’s estimated that there are fewer than 30,000 blue cranes in the wild, and their population is decreasing.
Lacy notes that blue cranes are the national bird of South Africa and are the only crane species out of the 15 that do not have any red markings on their body.
“Famously, both the sandhill crane and the whooping crane have a red head that they use to communicate to their species,” Lacy says. “So a [blue crane’s] head is kind of poofy and almost looks like the head of a cobra. They can expand their feathers out to make their head look big, so that's what they use to communicate instead of that red head. But maybe my favorite part of the blue crane is when they're standing. It looks like a tail, but it's really their tertiary feathers — they’re very, very long and extravagant, and so it looks like they're wearing a coat with tails.”
