Endangered cranes effort ends

Each spring for 12 years, Paula Wang began a temporary position at a government lab in a suburb north of Washington. She was required to remain silent while working and to wear a white suit and hood. The mission was not top-secret, but Wang felt it was urgent all the same: To save an endangered species.

Wang volunteered in the job, which involved using puppets to feed newborn whooping cranes, one of North America’s largest and rarest birds. As the chicks grew closer to their eventual five-foot height, she would escort them on walks and swims. The goal was to make the birds strong but not used to humans; to make them able to survive in the wild, even if they did not come from it.

This effort took place at the Patuxent Wildlife Research Center in Laurel, Maryland, which for 51 years has been the epicenter of a slow-going effort to rescue the snow-hued cranes from the precipice of extinction by breeding and training birds for release. It’s viewed as a model of wildlife conservation.

And now the effort is ending.

Funding for the $1.5 million whooping crane propagation program at Patuxent, part of a broader public-private initiative in the United States and Canada, dries up this month. The U.S. Geological Society, which runs the center, says the original mission of doing research to create a successful breeding program has been fulfilled. The 75-crane captive flock will be moved to other institutions, and breeding will continue at other sites, including the International Crane Foundation in Wisconsin and the Calgary Zoo. Officials say they feel confident that the species’ recovery will continue.

Patuxent’s program began in 1966 with Canus, an injured whooping crane who had been captured on the Canadian tundra and given a name that conveyed two nations’ cooperation to save the species. At the time, just 42 birds remained anywhere. Canus and whoopers hatched from 12 eggs collected from wild nests formed the nucleus of a breeding flock intended to be “a repository for genetic diversity,” said John French, the research center’s director, who led the program for a dozen years.

The program’s mission broadened in 2001 to include reintroduction. Patuxent would be both maternity ward and preschool — a place where chicks would receive training to take on the natural world.

This required some unusual techniques. There were more eggs than birds to raise them, so during each spring’s hatching season, staff and volunteers became surrogate parents for wobbly, 5-inch-tall chicks. To prevent the cranes from becoming tame, the humans donned crane costumes, guided their charges with crane hand-puppets and never spoke a word around them. For several years, part of the training involved teaching some whoopers to follow an ultralight plane that led a reintroduced flock on its annual migration from Wisconsin to Florida. The journey was obsessively followed by school groups and whooping crane fans, both in person and online.

The ultralight project ended in 2015 after federal wildlife officials concluded that something about this interventionist approach — the disguises, the planes — wasn’t working. Though the wild population had grown to about 500, the reintroduced flocks had proved to be poor at parenting and unable to fledge chicks in the wild. Just why remains unclear, but French said researchers now suspect the problem might have been the “bizarre way” the birds were raised. The breeding programs have since begun shifting from “costume-rearing” to bird-rearing.

French said a Patuxent planning process in early 2016 envisioned the end of the breeding program in 10 to 15 years. Word that the geological society had decided to cut it far sooner, at the close of this fiscal year, rippled this summer across crane-focused Facebook pages and through bird organizations.