New home working for whoopers

Follow the whooping crane training and migration at www.operationmigration.org. You can watch the training from a webcam mounted above the crane pen.

By David Horst   sandhill7@gmail.com

PRINCETON -- Crouching shoulder to shoulder in a shelter made of straw bales and old two-by-fours, we wait to watch the hard work that makes miracles happen.

Five-foot-tall birds – wild birds that had no parents – follow a manmade flying machine one time for the two or three months it needs to reach Florida, and then they fly back to this very spot in spring, unassisted, in a couple of weeks. It can only be described as miraculous.

Pilot Joe Duff leads five of the young whooping cranes.
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The birds are 10 whooping cranes, incubated in Maryland and flown in by plane. They spend nights in a well-fenced shelter, waiting to be released for their morning training with ultralight pilot Joe Duff, CEO of the nonprofit Operation Migration. We are maybe 30 yards away in a blind, camera lenses or fixed gazes peeking through an opening formed by the triangular steel lattice of an old antenna tower placed between rows of bales.

It is about 6:30 a.m. on Sunday, Aug. 28. Another beautiful day is breaking. The tight quarters chase away the hint of fall nip in the air. We’re at the White River Marsh, just east of Princeton, the new home of the grand experiment in teaching whooping cranes how to migrate.


Ten years of work at Necedah National Wildlife Refuge have added more than 100 migrating whoopers to the population and produced four chicks, but no surviving young. Three species of blackflies are suspected of harassing the whooping cranes into abandoning their nests at unusually high rates, leaving precious eggs to succumb to predators or the cold. So far, there’s no sign of those blackflies here, about 50 miles to the east, as the crane flies.

Caleb Fairfax and Geoffrey Tarbox, two young sons of New Hampshire working for Operation Migration feeding birds and cleaning the pen, swing the shelter doors open, setting off bounding white-and-brown bundles of energy – wings flapping and long legs springing.

Six men in the blind rapid-fire their cameras. Two women stream tears at the beauty of the scene.

Duff revs the ultralight engine, making tight turns to catch the birds’ interest. He looks to be dressed in a white sheet with a beekeeper’s facemask. It is his crane suit. The handlers are never without them when within view of the whoopers. Getting acclimated to humans could be fatal for these important members of an endangered species.

Duff bumps around into position onto the clearing that barely qualifies as a runway. He lays down the throttle and all 10 of the young cranes follow him skyward, taking our spirits with them. Four, and then five, settle back to the ground.

“Even I was impressed,” Fairfax says after witnessing the whole flock take to the air for the first, brief time.

Asked if after a decade leading birds into flight ever becomes routine, Duff replied, “It can’t.”

They go for training flights every day that weather allows. For our visit, he made several passes in two flights of about 15 minutes each, landing in between to reward the birds with grapes dispensed from a crane head puppet worn on his hand.

Watching babies of any species warms the heart. With so much riding on these youngsters, seeing them jump around energetically and glide majestically across the morning horizon intensifies the fun with awe.

Duff flies at 32 mph, just above stalling speed for the ultralight. The birds fly all around, not yet educated to the benefit of flying in the vortices produced by the wings, as they will during migration in early October.

Putting together the new facility was quite a rush job, with permits and approvals just coming in May. “The DNR has been fabulous, very supportive,” Duff said, adding that it is working out fine.

He acknowledges the nesting failure has brought considerable pressure from critics. He argues that despite the lack of successful reproduction, adult crane survival has been good, nesting behavior is taking place and the birds are producing eggs with thick enough shells.

“It’s definitely an educational opportunity, which is just as important, maybe more important, than saving cranes,” Duff said.

 “All of the team feels this project has a long way to go. Let’s face it, we got them to migrate, and that was impossible. We’re doing fine.”

That said, Duff ambles back to his ride. He makes a low pass over his visitors as he heads back to secure the plane until another day of training cranes, and making a miracle.