Dramatic saga of whooping crane explains flyways
While the concept of four primary North American migratory bird flyways is taken for granted today, it didn’t always exist.
To understand the concept’s importance, one needs to look no further than the dramatic saga of the whooping crane.
In 1941, the whooping crane was reduced to 15 individuals. Demand for feathers by the ladies’ hat industry and agricultural drainage of nesting grounds had taken such a toll on North America’s tallest bird that Aldo Leopold wrote it off as a goner. Fortunately, recovery efforts have fostered a steady turnaround.
The fact that the majestic whooping crane did not follow the passenger pigeon into extinction owes to developments that preceded recovery efforts. Bird banding, for one, produced an understanding of migration that led to improved management strategies.
Bird banding is traceable to Ancient Rome. Modern records, however, credit naturalist John James Audubon with conducting the first banding study in North America when, in 1803, he attached silver wires to the legs of a brood of phoebes and noted the return of two the following year. While observers had long been aware of waterfowl migrations, leg banding in the 1900s hastened the rate at which science made practical use of the information, eventually spawning the flyway concept.
Ornithologist Frederick Lincoln spearheaded bird migration studies for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s predecessor, the Bureau of Biological Survey.
“Recovery of banded ducks and geese accumulated so rapidly,” Lincoln wrote, “that by 1930 it was possible to map out the four waterfowl flyways’ great geographical regions, each with breeding and wintering grounds connected by a complicated series of migration routes.”
Until then, most federal lands set aside for natural resources had been established as independent oases. Lincoln
helped oversee an era of managing these lands so that habitat would be available to waterfowl throughout their journeys.
“When refuges were finally managed along flyways in the 1930s, they began functioning as a system; the parts became greater than the whole,” said Service historian Mark Madison.
Lincoln went further, raising the science of collecting bird data to a new level, literally. As an aviator and a biologist, Lincoln knew the advantage that flight would bestow in tracking waterfowl populations, even if his predecessors had been unconvinced.
“Before Lincoln, the agency just didn’t have much faith in combining biology with aviation,” said Madison. “The idea of making like the birds in order to study them seemed like an extravagance.”
But the pilot-biologist idea ultimately did take off, so to speak, and the aerial survey program has been instrumental in waterfowl management ever since.