We’ve just returned from a visit to the whooping cranes (Grus americana) at one of my favorite places in Texas, the Aransas National Wildlife Refuge. Four of our students went on the two-day trip: Natalie Chan, Chris Kelley, Steve Lanier, and Antonio Madrid. Slowly but surely they're all emerging as naturalists. We camped at Goose Island State Park some thirty-five miles away, not ideal, but the best you can do unless you plan to camp in an RV park. The evening and the dawn were spent at Aransas. We walked most of the trails, but Aransas needs more hiking trails and fewer cars. The strips of beach along San Antonio Bay (as with every other undeveloped waterfront I’ve been on the Gulf of Mexico during the last five years) was strewn with trash—old cans, plastic bottle, a dilapidated buoy, etc.—deposited by the water. When the ocean treats you that way, there’s not much you can do afterwards unless you have the patience and energy to clean hundreds of miles of oceanfront every day. The point is not to trash the ocean in the first place.
We saw the cranes in the distant mud flats southeast of the Observation Tower both yesterday and today, presumably the same couple both days. The Reserve personnel believe that this region becomes the feeding territory of a single family each year. The ones we observed were quite far away, perhaps almost a mile, but the shape and behavior were characteristic enough to preclude false identification (at least through a good spotting scope). Whooping cranes are neither as large, nor perhaps as magnificent, as the sarus cranes (Grus antigone) back home but, that said, they’re still about as strong as birds can be. To Bob Allen (who, through his advocacy and research, was perhaps the single individual most responsible for preventing their extinction) these cranes looked like prehistoric survivors from a long bygone era:
“When you do spot a whooping crane, you wonder how you could mistake him for anything else or anything else for him. He looks like a great, flightless, prehistoric bird, prancing about over the mud flats, His stride, the length and thickness of his neck, and the long sloping back with its dangling plumes over the tail are completely characteristic [1, 41].”
Even their behavior seems equally prehistoric, somewhat savage. This morning our pair took umbrage at the presence of a flock of American white pelicans (Pelecanus erythrorhynchos) in their feeding area and pecked them out of the territory. Not a single one was allowed to stay. Given its strength and the length of its legs, it hardly comes as a surprise that the species is known for its fast walking as much as it is known for its transcontinental aerial migrations. We finally heard a few call in the distance in the evening: nothing had quite prepared me for it. It is no ordinary whooping, and is supposed to carry over four miles. The call consists of a high note similar to the blast from an open cornet, followed by a rolling note on a high register, and then a lower trumpet note. When several call, the sound can be unnerving.
Whooping cranes are perhaps the best-known birds in Texas. Probably every child has heard of them and, for many, the species has come to symbolize the meaning of nature protection. Luckily, so far, it appears to be a success story, but not an easy one. The cranes (an endangered species) winter at Aransas every year, flying in from their breeding grounds in the Northwest Territories of Canada 2 400 miles away. This relict population is the best hope that the species will continue to persist. Hunting played a role in its disappearance through much of its traditional range, but habitat transformation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was probably far more important. (Whooping cranes are notoriously shy and were always difficult to hunt.) As marshes and wetlands were converted to agriculture in much of the northern United States, the cranes abandoned their traditional breeding grounds and simply disappeared. Such was their plight in the early decades of the last century that Aransas was established as a refuge by executive order as early as 31 December 1937 in an explicit attempt to save the cranes from extinction [2]. Executive Order No. 77841 declared 47 215 acres of Blackjack Peninsula in Aransas, Calhoun, and Refugio counties to constitute a wildlife reserve. For conservationists this may well have been one of Franklin Roosevelt’s most important actions. (Today the refuge complex, including areas in Matagorda island, shielding the Blackjack Peninsula from the Gulf, consists of some 115 000 acres.)
By 1940 the wild whooping crane population had fallen to thirty-two, twenty-six in Texas, and six in Louisiana. By 1941-42, the Aransas population had dropped to sixteen individuals [2]. The nonmigratory Louisiana population disappeared around 1950. The Texas population fluctuated but began a slow recovery in the 1950s (there were thirty-one birds, all at Aransas, in 1950, twenty-one in 1952, and thirty-six in 1960), Nevertheless, Aransas was initially hardly the refuge that it was intended to be. By 1950, the famed Texas naturalist, Roy Bedichek, had virtually given up hope:
“Hedged in, this magnificent bird is making its last stand on earth. Farming areas on one side of the Refuge edge in closer and closer; on the other, the everlasting barrier of the Gulf. Slashing through the whole length of littoral, and even invading part of the Refuge itself, runs the Intracoastal Canal, on which mile-long lines of oil barges trail their oil and filth every few hours from one end of crane territory to the other. County road builders are making mud-shell excavations at this writing, tearing down a protective reef on one end and perhaps opening the way for hurricane waters. But worst of all, and as a final debauchment of these virgin marshes, are the oil ‘developers’ pushing in for the final squeeze, making their seismographic surveys, which involve earth jarring, subterranean peals of artificial thunder as well as terrifying underwater explosions, occasionally blowing out a deadly ‘oil slick’ to mess up the waters of a bay—deadly, I mean, to all avian life. Besides these ‘thunderers,’ there are spotted (sparsely at present) over the whole area colonies of drillers boring five, eight, fifteen thousand feet for oil and gas. Moreover, the grazing rights are leased to cattle interests whose employees ride horseback of ‘jeep’ around the whole place, calling their cattle, not as of old from the melodious throats of cowboys, but (loyal to the machine age) with an ambulance siren! Fleets now of bombers, from the great naval airbase only forty miles away, occasionally drone overhead or shriek across the sky [3, 25 -26].”
Bedichek was referring to the bombing range on Matagorda Island, where cranes are once again beginning to winter. Visible signs of the oil industry are still all around the refuge, as they are almost anywhere on the Texas coast. What probably saved the whooping crane was its listing in 1967 under the 1966 Endangered Species Act. The same year, a fraction of the eggs from the cranes’ Canadian breeding grounds (which was finally discovered in the Wood Buffalo National Park) began to be airlifted to the National Wildlife Research Center in Patuxent, Maryland for artificial incubation, a practice which continues to this day. By 1970 the wild population in Texas had risen to fifty-seven, with another fourteen captive birds in Patuxent. The 1973 Endangered Species Act required the formulation of a whooping crane recovery plan and the first such plan was published in 1980. By then, the wild population had grown to ninety-eight, with twenty of them in New Mexico. The Texas flock finally topped a hundred birds in 1986. A successful recovery was finally on the way. This year some two hundred and twenty cranes have so far been counted at Aransas, about the same as last year. (There is also a significant captive populations and efforts continue to establish wild populations in Florida and Wisconsin.)
Children are taught how dedicated effort can even save a species that most ornithologists had given up to extinction. I have never been able to get a proper estimate of the amount of money that has been spent on saving the whooping crane but it must run at least into the tens of millions of dollars (one Refuge official estimates it in the hundreds). The trouble is that we cannot afford this amount on every one of our threatened and endangered species. We have to protect entire habitats and devise management plans for species long before they appear on the brink of extinction. Unfortunately, the Endangered Species Act continues to be the only really powerful piece of legislation that we have. For the last decade it, too, has been under attack and, unless the Republican Party recovers its soul from the Devil, or is decisively voted out of power for a generation, the prospect for nature in the US will continue to be bleak.
I have had some of my best birding in Texas at Aransas and this short trip was no exception. Near the Observation Tower, a laughing gull (Larus atricilla) chased a turkey vulture away. A flock of wild turkeys hung around the Refuge office. One of my favorites, the beautifully-banded killdeer (Charadrius vociferus) strutted along the waterfront of San Antonio bay and also around most of the lakes. In our first fifteen minutes at the Observation Tower last evening, we identified more than twenty species. Besides the crane, I added three other species to my lifelist: the American white pelican, the marbled godwit (Limosa fedoa), and the greater yellowlegs (Tringa melanoleuca). But birds were only a minor part of the story of what we saw. Javelinas waddled along among the pelicans on Mustang Lake. White-tailed deer were abundant among the oak woodlands—it’s easy to see why these must be occasionally culled. But these refuge-dwelling dear seemed so tame (as Bedichek [3] predicted they would be) that it is downright unfair to shoot at them. We disturbed an armadillo near the beach close to the Observation Tower, and glimpsed its tail as it fled into the undergrowth. Alligators were also abundant on Jones Lake. If you’ve never experienced Aransas, now is the time to go. The cranes will be gone some time next month. On the other hand, the spring bird migration from further south will be in full swing.
[1] Allen, R. P. 1957. On the Trail of Vanishing Birds. New York: McGraw-Hill.
[2] Doughty, R. 1989. The Return of the Whooping Crane. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.
[3] Bedichek, R. 1950. Karánkaway Country. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.
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