An early February thunderstorm in central Florida brought tragedy to the small population of whooping cranes that call eastern North America home, killing 17 of 18 young birds that biologists raised and taught to migrate during 2006. Bird watchers everywhere mourned the loss of these beautiful, endangered creatures.

Rare as they are, “whoopers” have a Hoosier connection. From December through March, Muscatatuck National Wildlife Refuge biologist Theresa Dailey kept tabs on three large whooping cranes that fed and roosted in flooded corn fields near an area between Seymour and Brownstown called Ewing Bottoms.

Several times each week, Dailey drove Jackson County back roads, checking a receiver for signals from the radio-tagged cranes.

She stopped periodically to scan shallow flood pools for the birds, using binoculars to squint through heat waves rising perversely through the 10-degree air.

“We had three whoopers from the ‘02 and ‘04 flights staying around Ewing Bottoms,” Dailey said. “A whooper was also seen at Goose Pond Fish and Wildlife Area, and several whoopers from the ‘01 and ‘06 flights hung around Ewing Bottoms earlier in the winter.”

Those “flights” were annual fall ultra-light-aircraft-led whooping crane Operation Migration expeditions. The 2006 flight of the ill-fated central Florida young whoopers flew over Indiana last November, making it the sixth group of young birds taught traditional migration routes by following ultra-light planes from northern Wisconsin southward.

“Whooping cranes learn their migration route by following their parents,” Dailey said. “But this knowledge is lost when the species is reduced and there are no longer any wild birds using the flyway.”

The Operation Migration Web site reported that, after the recent loss, 61 migratory whooping cranes still lived in the eastern North America wild.

Whooping cranes were nearly extinct in the 1940s, when the last migrating flock dwindled to an all-time low of 15. Today, about 350 whooping cranes live in the wild. Aside from the Wisconsin-Florida birds, the only other migrating population nests in the Northwest territories of Canada and winters on the Texas Gulf coast.

Whooping cranes are the tallest birds in North America, standing 5 feet tall with a 7- to 8-foot wingspan. For more whooping crane information:
www.operationmigration.org
www.bringbackthecranes.org