Flaws in Sandhill Crane Flight Plan


This fall, an ultralight airplane will take off from central Wisconsin with 14 sandhill cranes in tow. The ultralight will lead the cranes across the Great Lakes region and on to Florida – where the birds will spend the winter. This is the latest attempt to teach wild birds how to migrate. But the challenge lies in ensuring the birds don’t become tame. That’s exactly what happened to another group of sandhill cranes now living in New York. Their fate has led some to question whether the birds are being treated fairly. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Karen Kelly reports:

Transcript

This fall, an ultralight airplane will take off from
central Wisconsin with 14 sandhill cranes in tow.
The ultralight will lead the cranes across the Great
Lakes region and on to Florida – where the birds will
spend the winter. This is the latest attempt to teach wild birds how to
migrate.
But the challenge lies in ensuring the birds don’t
become tame. That’s exactly what happened to another group of sandhill
cranes now living in New York. Their fate has led some to question
whether the birds are being treated fairly. The Great Lakes Radio
Consortium’s Karen Kelly reports.

Paul Tebbel knows first hand how wild sandhill cranes
react to the sight of a human. He’s the manager of Audobon’s Rowe Sanctuary for
cranes in central Nebraska.
Every spring, hundreds of thousands of the birds stop
there on their way north.
Tebbel says it’s an amazing spectacle – but it’s
impossible to witness it up close.


“To simply get out of a car 100 yards away from
those cranes, they will flush away from you and if you
were to walk towards them, they would leave the area
en masse.”


(Crane calling)


Which makes this crane at the Berkshire Bird
Paradise in upstate New York rather unusual.
He and another crane arrived a few weeks ago after a
wildlife biologist picked them up in Central New York
state.
Their long, thin beaks are as sharp as a dagger.
So, folks got nervous when the four foot tall birds
started hanging around their neighborhood.
Peter Dubacher runs the Berkshire Bird Paradise.
He plays with the crane as it tries to pull a ring off
his finger.

“Notice how docile this one is. This guy was
raised in captivity so he never had a chance to learn
the ropes of what it takes to survive.”


And this crane isn’t alone.
Reports have come in of four more wandering around
central New York.
The cranes were part of an experiment run by a
Canadian group called Operation Migration.
They work with researchers all over North America to
train wild birds how to migrate.
Their project was featured in the film, Fly Away Home.
These cranes were raised at the National Wildlife
Research Center in Patuxent, Maryland.
They were taught to follow an ultralight airplane from
Maryland to Operation Migration’s headquarters in
Ontario, Canada.
Once the experiment was done, they were released on a
refuge in New York.
But they didn’t stay there long.
And, according to New York conservation officer Ward
Stone, that’s when the trouble started.


“The bird had been acting very tame, eating out
of people’s hands, following kids around a school bus
wait. I think the lesson here is that some of these
experiments can go awry and I think this is one that
did.


But Heather Ray of Operation Migration disagrees.
She says, when they first started their experiments,
they did accidentally tame some birds.
Their goal was to tame the birds to the airplane, so
they would fly behind it.
But the birds got used to humans as well.
They learned to trust people and associate them with
food.
She says this time, the researchers used costumes so
the birds would not recognize them as human.


“Those birds never saw a human being, never heard
a human voice. The only human activity and things that
they saw were costumed figures that were wearing big,
flowing gray costumes that came down to the ankle.”


However, a recent study in the journal Conservation
Biology questions the use of costumes.
It reports condors raised by people wearing costumes
in California were inadvertently tamed.
Ray maintains the cranes were tamed by humans after
they were released.
But even when mistakes are made, she says the errors
are far outweighed by the importance of the group’s
task.
They’re using sand hill cranes as guinea pigs for
future experiments with the endangered whooping crane.


The two birds are closely related.
And the hope is to establish new populations of
whooping cranes by teaching them different migration
routes.
Paul Tebbell at Nebraska’s Rowe sanctuary says many
biologists agree that other animals might have to be
sacrificed for the whooping crane’s cause.
He says that’s because the situation is desperate –
there are fewer than 2 hundred whooping cranes left in
the wild.
But he argues scientists still have obligations to the
animals they work with.


“If you’re going to take sandhill cranes
and you’re going to tame them, there needs to be
someone to take care of those cranes for the rest of
their lives. That’s a must in my mind. I don’t think
any researchers have the right to use these birds and
then cast them out to be on their own when they
haven’t had the proper training in being a crane.”


(Sound of crane)
Despite the controversy, the work with migrating
cranes continues.
But for sandhill cranes like this one, living in
captivity in New York, there will be no more trips
south.
The winters will be spent in a greenhouse – a
sacrifice made in an attempt to save another crane
from disappearing altogether.
For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Karen Kelly.