International Crane Foundation

The biologist Stephanie Schmidt began her work with cranes like many others at the International Crane Foundation—by raising Whooping Crane chicks dressed in a white costume and using a puppet resembling an adult crane’s head. This technique, called costume rearing, helps add birds to the endangered wild population, which numbers only about 700. Whooping Crane chicks imprint on their caregiver—human or bird—so Schmidt and her colleagues couldn’t act or sound human. Dressed in costume, they taught the chicks how to feed, find water, spot and avoid danger, and eventually, how to fly.

“It seems silly, but it serves such an important role,” Schmidt says. “We essentially teach Whooping Cranes that they are a Whooping Crane and model the strong behaviors that they should be using to stay alive once they’re out in the wild.” At ICF, captive Whooping Crane adults also raise chicks that will be released, but costume rearing allows for far more birds to be reintroduced.

Whooping Cranes. Photo by Ciming Mei.

Schmidt, having learned about ICF while studying endangered species as an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, was a summer intern then. But as her program was coming to an end, she realized she wasn’t ready to leave. “I didn’t want to be an empty nester just yet,” she jokes. She’d been a “parent” of several chicks, including one, Martin, she had been given the opportunity to name. When she learned they were going to be sent to a small flock in Louisiana, she decided to follow.

While working with ICF’s local partners on their release, she watched Martin take his first steps in the wild. “It was a really powerful moment and something that is hard to shake,” she says. Schmidt went to graduate school but once it was time to start looking for a job, ICF was the first place she looked. She is now its lead outreach biologist.

Stephanie Schmidt sharing information on cranes and the wetland habitats they rely on. Photo by Garrett Hopkins.

Cranes evoke strong emotions. Social and communicative, some stand as tall as humans. Mated pairs are monogamous, and they dance and call together in synchronized duets. Aldo Leopold, the great naturalist who lived a short drive from ICF’s headquarters in Baraboo, Wisconsin, once wrote of Sandhill Cranes, the other North American crane species, “When we hear his call, we hear no mere bird. We hear the trumpet in the orchestra of evolution.”

Indeed, in Nebraska, where today around a million Sandhill Cranes (and dozens of Whooping Cranes) gather each spring on the Platte River during their northbound migration, fossils of a bird with a structure identical to the Sandhill Crane have been found and dated to the Miocene.

A Whooping Crane amongst throngs of Sandhill Cranes on the Platte River in Nebraska during their northbound migration. Photo by Triet Tran/International Crane Foundation.

There are 15 species of cranes around the world, almost all rare, and they live on every continent except South America and Antarctica. The Whooping Crane is North America’s tallest bird, five-feet tall with up to eight-foot-wide wings, and snow white with a black mustache and a crimson crown. By comparison, the Sandhill is four-feet-tall with six-foot-wide wings, gray overall with a similar red crown. In Baraboo, one can find all 15 species in captivity, public ambassadors for their wild counterparts. Held sacred by Hindus and Buddhists, cranes are revered in many cultures as symbols of peace, happiness, and good luck. But globally, 11 of the 15 species are threatened. It is the mission of the International Crane Foundation, which began in the early 1970s as the dream of two Cornell University classmates, to protect the birds by conserving the watersheds and migratory flyways they need to survive. Their conservation work runs through 50 countries (with regional offices in six), from the Kafue Flats in Zambia, which supports most of the world’s remaining Wattled Cranes, to Yakutia in arctic Russia, the breeding grounds of the Siberian Crane, to the freshwater marshes of North America, where Whooping Cranes, the rarest of the family, continue to see off extinction.

At the International Crane Foundation headquarters in Baraboo, Wisconsin, one can find all 15 crane species in captivity. Photo courtesy of the International Crane Foundation.

It all started with an empty red barn in Baraboo. In the fall of 1971, graduate students George Archibald and Ron Sauey—brought together by a shared admiration of Aldo Leopold—envisioned a “world center” for crane conservation. Archibald, who was from the backwoods of Nova Scotia, had assembled a large captive collection of cranes at Cornell and was studying their vocal repertoire. Sauey, whose family had run a large plastics factory, grew up on a horse farm in Baraboo. When his parents moved to Florida, that farm sat vacant—until they agreed to rent it to Archibald and their son for one dollar a year. The red barn became ICF’s first aviary.

“We settled on a simple mission statement,” Archibald wrote later, “the mission of the International Crane Foundation is the study and preservation of cranes worldwide.”

They opened as a nonprofit in 1973, but the early years were lean. The entire staff were volunteers, and nobody got paid for a while. But they worked with an urgency that met the critical conservation status of the birds they sought to preserve. Over the next several years, Archibald got permission to study cranes in the Demilitarized Zone between North and South Korea while Sauey turned his attention to the last Siberian Cranes that winter in India. Archibald also began a partnership with ornithologists in China—a country home to eight of the 15 crane species—that continued for more than four decades.

Early International Crane Foundation staff, with Co-founder George Archibald second from left. Photo courtesy of International Crane Foundation.

George Archibald studying cranes in the Demilitarized Zone between North and South Korea. Photo courtesy of International Crane Foundation.

There was also plenty to worry about at home. At the time, just under 50 Whooping Cranes remained in the wild, migrating about 5,000 miles between Aransas National Wildlife Refuge on the Texas Gulf Coast and Wood Buffalo National Park in northern Canada. In 1942, their numbers had dropped to about 20 individuals, and efforts to save them were stalled by one major problem: no one knew where they bred. That changed in 1954, when firefighters battling a blaze at Wood Buffalo National Park happened to spot two adult cranes with their rusty orange chick, or colt, amidst the wetlands. Starting in 1966, scientists began removing one egg from each nest, since cranes typically lay two but only rear one chick, and transporting them to Maryland’s Patuxent Wildlife Research Center. The eggs were hatched and the chicks reared to start a captive flock. It was a buffer against extinction.

Whoopers were never common in North America, though their range was once wider. Historic estimates suggest their peak population may have reached 10,000, but in the mid-1800s only 1,200 to 1,500 remained, according to ICF. Along with Sandhills, they were hunted for food and fashion; their feathers, like those of other wading birds, adorned women’s hats. The Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 ended large-scale killing, but while Sandhills began to rebound, their larger relatives did not. In 1940, a hurricane wiped out a tiny nonmigratory population in Louisiana, leaving just one small migratory flock in North America’s Central Flyway. Once their nesting grounds were discovered in Canada, their full migratory route, including key stopovers and wintering grounds in Texas, could finally be protected.

Whooping and Sandhill Cranes can live up to 25 years in the wild, but they mature slowly and only start to nest around the age of four. To safeguard against a disaster wiping out the entire population, Whooping Cranes had to be restored to portions of their former range. Captive rearing and reintroduction efforts, which ICF joined in the 1970s, became the strategy. But it took decades to gain traction, and scientists are still learning from the process.

The first attempt to establish a new migratory population began in 1975, when the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and Canadian Wildlife Service placed Whooping Crane eggs in Sandhill Crane nests in Idaho. The hope was that the Sandhills would raise the chicks as their own and then the Whoopers would adopt the Sandhills’ migratory route to Bosque del Apache in New Mexico. While many chicks hatched, a problem became apparent once the Whoopers reached sexual maturity: they weren’t interested in mating with their own species, having imprinted on Sandhills instead. That project was eventually abandoned, and the last Whooping Crane from that group died in 2002.

In 1976, a captive Whooping Crane named Tex was sent from Patuxent in Maryland to ICF. Having imprinted on humans after hatching, she had no interest in pairing with other cranes. But George Archibald reasoned “that if Tex had a human companion during the spring breeding season, she might be stimulated to ovulate and lay an egg,” he wrote in his memoir. Archibald pledged to help her, and over the next seven years, he spent each spring courting Tex: dancing when she danced, bowing, jumping, running, and tossing small sticks in the air. In 1982, Tex finally hatched her one and only chick, which was named Gee Whiz.

George Archibald with Tex, a Whooping Crane who imprinted on humans. Photo courtesy of International Crane Foundation. 

The story was so incredible that Archibald was invited onto Johnny Carson’s “Tonight Show” to tell it. Hours before he was about to go on, though, he got a call from a staff member in Baraboo who told him that Tex had been killed that night by a pack of raccoons.

Tex exemplified the triumph and heartbreak of trying to nurse this species back to life. Gee Whiz stayed in captivity but would contribute 178 chicks and grand-chicks to their reintroduction over the next four decades. Captive breeding and rearing is an art and a science—“When you’ve basically lost a population, you have to play the love exchange,” says ICF’s CEO and President, Rich Beilfuss. Their biologists continue fine-tuning that process, assessing genealogy and genetic profiles to increase diversity and raise cranes that can succeed in the wild.

Those early years provided valuable lessons. In the 1990s, a nonmigratory flock was introduced to Florida, but it struggled due to marshland loss and bobcat predation. But a third attempt started to stick. In 2001, costume-reared Whooping Cranes were released in Wisconsin, where they hadn’t been seen for 120 years. Researchers had carefully mapped a new eastern migratory route, spanning 1,200 miles between Wisconsin and Florida with key wetland stopovers. In several marshes, they built large release pens where the birds could acclimate to the wild under the watch of their human “parents.” Since young cranes learn to migrate by following their parents, it fell to ICF biologists to lead the way when the weather turned cold.

Costume rearing is a technique to ensure that Whooping Crane chicks imprint on their own species, not on humans. Photo by Tom Lynn.

Dressed in Whooping Crane costumes, biologists piloted an ultralight aircraft—“like a kite with a giant fan on the back,” as Stephanie Schmidt describes it—while broadcasting the same calls the cranes heard while being reared. They stopped frequently to rest and help the cranes familiarize themselves with each area along the way. “At that point cranes have a lot of learning capacity. So they were learning that entire time on their migration south,” Schmidt says.

When spring arrived, the young cranes were able to retrace their route north. The method worked, and this new eastern migratory population saw its first wild hatch in 2006 at Wisconsin’s Necedah National Wildlife Refuge. ICF continued to teach the migratory route until 2016, and then transitioned to a less intensive strategy that involves placing captive-reared chicks with wild adult pairs, who are expected to adopt the young and guide them to their wintering grounds—now most commonly in western Indiana and northern Alabama.

Buoyed by that success, ICF and state and managed care partners began reintroducing Whooping Cranes to southwest Louisiana in 2011, the former home of the nonmigratory population wiped out by the hurricane in 1940. Unlike Florida, the region offers vast wetlands unlikely to be lost to subdivision development. Flooded agricultural fields, used to raise crawfish or grow rice, are especially attractive to the birds. Today, the adults in the area now fledge about four to five chicks on their own per year, according to Brittney Palode, ICF’s outreach program assistant in Louisiana.

The most recent count estimates 691 Whooping Cranes in the wild: 536 in the Aransas-to-Wood Buffalo population, 79 in Louisiana, 71 in the eastern migratory population, and just 5 in Florida nonmigratory flock. Another 143 live in captivity, serving as a genetic reservoir for the species. Currently, ICF works with partners like the Wilder Institute/Calgary Zoo, the Dallas Zoo, White Oak Conservation in Florida, and the Audubon Species Survival Center in Louisiana to support the breeding, rearing and release of Whooping Cranes.

The gains have been hard-won, but this isn’t a straight-line success story. Energy infrastructure like power lines pose great risk to cranes. And in recent years, Whoopers have been poached in Louisiana and Oklahoma, shot for sport. (Sandhill Cranes, which are far more numerous, can be legally hunted in most of the states they pass through.) One bird, known as L4-23, was conceived in Baraboo by a captive pair, hatched at the Dallas Zoo, raised by foster parents in Texas, and released in Louisiana—only to be found fatally shot less than two months later. The story made the front page of the Dallas Morning News. Since 2010, at least 36 Whooping Cranes have been shot in the U.S., including at least 13 in the eastern migratory group.

Other threats are growing. In the East, more than 300 Whooping Cranes have been released and over 30 have hatched in the wild, but with only 71 currently alive, it’s clear that life in the wild is tough. In recent years, deaths have outpaced additions. The main culprits, according to ICF’s CEO and President Rich Beilfuss, are mid-sized predators like coyotes and raccoons, which have become more common in the absence of wolves on the Wisconsin prairie. “Watching parents lose chicks after 50 or 60 days, just shy of fledging, is heartbreaking,” he says. “If you put out five birds, odds are you’re going to lose all five. So you try to put out 20 and hope a few can make it through.”

Hundreds of thousands of Sandhill Cranes gathering at Nebraska's Platte River. Photo by Ryan Michalesko.

The ICF’s history shows that the conservation of cranes is inseparable from protecting large wetland ecosystems around the world. Whooping Cranes need vast, specific spaces—they’ll defend breeding territories of up to a thousand acres, Schmidt says–and are highly selective about the freshwater habitat they use for nesting, wintering, or migrating. Sandhill Cranes, by contrast, are far more adaptable, foraging in prairies, upland fields, and farmland. Though never as close to extinction as Whooping Cranes, Sandhills were once in steep decline. Habitat restoration and the end to market hunting was the catalyst for their dramatic rebound. Today, around a million pass through Nebraska’s Platte River in March, fattening up on leftover corn in surrounding farms for three or four weeks before flying north again, fanning out across Canada, Alaska and even into eastern Siberia.

To Beilfuss, that recovery holds a broader lesson. “When we were founded, a lot of cranes were still living in pristine areas,” he says. “But now most of our work is around working lands. And I see cranes as champions for healthy working lands, whether those are wetlands or grasslands or farm fields.”

To learn more about the International Crane Foundation, as well as to contribute directly, please visit their website.

The International Crane Foundation is a nonprofit organization working globally to conserve cranes and the ecosystems, watersheds and flyways on which they depend.