dendroica: Whooping cranes didn’t so well in Florida. Next…
Whooping cranes didn’t so well in Florida. Next stop: Louisiana.
If you have never seen a stately whooping crane in the wild in Florida, better hurry. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service wants to transplant a bunch of them to Louisiana.
The whoopers — as they’re sometimes called — live in a couple of different places in the state. The flock the federal agency is targeting lives in the Kissimmee Prairie area of Central Florida, around Leesburg. It numbers only 14, according to the agency.
The Kissimmee whoopers are part of a long-term experiment to spread the 5-foot-tall endangered birds into habitat they occupied decades ago. The cranes, named for their bugling cry audible up to 2 miles away, once filled the skies from Florida to the Rockies.
By 1941, though, their numbers had dwindled to only 21 birds. The cause: decades of unregulated hunting and the destruction of their marshy nesting grounds.
The last reported sighting in Florida was in Osceola County in 1936 — unless you count the 1938 novel The Yearling by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, which mentions a cotillion of whooping cranes that leave the main character speechless with their elaborate mating dance.
In the ‘40s, the last remaining flock of cranes in North America migrated every year from the Gulf Coast of Texas to somewhere in the north of Canada to breed. Researches searched for their breeding ground for 14 years before finding it. That was the first step toward saving the species.
There are now about 600 whoopers in North America, some in captivity and others in the wild.
The ones in Kissimmee sprang from a flock that was raised in captivity in Wisconsin, then turned loose in Central Florida in the hope of reviving Florida’s non-migratory whooping flocks. But out of 289 whooping cranes that were released there from 1993 to 2004, federal officials said just above a dozen birds remain.
Over the years the Kissimmee flock, which lives in Florida year-round, notched several achievements, including having one of them — nicknamed “Lucky” because it survived an eagle attack — become the first whooping crane chick to fledge in the United States since 1939.
Reposted from http://lies.tumblr.com/post/172657828127.
Tags: when i was nine, and first starting to care about birds, i read about whooping cranes, and having already learned, about passenger pigeons, and carolina parakeets, the near-certain knowledge, that they would soon be extinct, was like a blow, i was processing loss already, loss of home, loss of family, loss of place, and for some reason the whooping cranes, seemed to sum it all up, the world without them, would be a darker place, stretching on literally forever, that darkness entered into me, and stayed, listen 9-year-old me, you turned 56 last week, the darkness is still out there, but for now, the whooping cranes are still here.
