In the US this month, a group of conservationists will don 'crane suits' and crank up primitive flying machines, in a bid to teach birds to fly. Paddy Woodworth follows the save-the-crane project
We stop talking when we are within 200m of the hide, so we can advance in silence. We pick our steps carefully in the early dusk, easing our way into an improvised bunker of hay bales. Through deep, narrow slats in the straw we can see the holding pen, another 100m beyond us, and the tall, stately birds moving within it, but they cannot see us. The success of a unique conservation project depends, among many other factors, on minimum human contact with these young cranes.
Whooping cranes are among the rarest birds in North America, and 16 of them are foraging in the protected area. They are still feeding steadily after a short but exhausting flight 10 hours earlier. "This is the same number as were left wild in the whole world in 1941," says Jeff Huxmann in a barely audible whisper. He still sounds a little in awe of what we are seeing, despite three years as the project's cameraman.
The birds hatched in captivity only six months ago, but they already stand almost as tall as the parents they have never seen: 150cm (five feet) from crown to ground. They still lack the pristine white plumage of adult cranes, and they are a motley lot, splashed and streaked with irregular patches of rusty brown.
At dawn, 15 of them flew 23 miles behind three microlight aircraft. Their upbringing has been carefully planned to make them regard these machines, and their pilots, as surrogate parents. The pilots wear white "crane suits", with only small visors for their eyes. They look a bit like circus clowns or mime artists, but this project is a very serious business. If it works it will greatly enhance the still slim survival prospects of this species, which is almost as emblematic as the bald eagle.
The goal is to use the microlights to create a flock of migratory whooping cranes in the eastern half of North America. It would be the first such flock in the region since the end of the 19th century and only the second in the world today.
The microlights, which are fondly known as "trikes" because they have three landing wheels, were linked to the birds even before they were born. While they were in their eggs the embryonic chicks were played audio tapes of microlight engines. When they hatched they were fed by crane puppets, because if young cranes have any direct contact with people they become too friendly for their own good, starting to drop in on golf courses and school yards.
So, once they were released into outdoor pens, the first creatures they saw were the microlights and their crane-suited pilots. Thus imprinted, they learned to follow the microlights everywhere, finally flapping clumsily after them into the air for their first flights.
They are now just two days into a journey in which their human mentors will teach them a migration route of 1,917km (1,191 miles), from the Midwest to Florida. Many difficult days lie ahead, and huge challenges have had to be overcome just to reach this point.
Aircraft-assisted bird migration was pioneered by William Lishman, the sculptor and pilot whose adventures in training geese to migrate were the subject of the Oscar-nominated film Fly Away Home. Lishman is chairman of Operation Migration, which is in charge of the cranes' journey south. The organisation is the most visible link in Whooping Crane Eastern Partnership, an umbrella group of federal, state and private bodies, including the International Crane Foundation, which is working to reintroduce the cranes east of the Mississippi.
Lishman's associate Joe Duff leads the team of three pilot parents, who had left Necedah National Wildlife Refuge, in central Wisconsin, two days earlier. I had arrived there that day at 6.30am, in the hope of seeing the young cranes begin the first stage of their journey. I was lucky. Other "craniacs" had been keeping early-morning vigil for seven days, but bad wind conditions made departure too big a gamble. Flying with cranes is a very tricky business; ideally it requires an absolutely still day or a rock-steady and very moderate tailwind. Anything else greatly increases the chance of a collision between birds and pilots, which could be fatal to both.
Heather Ray of Operation Migration calculates that $100,000 (€81,500) is invested in each young bird, but the financial risk is the least of her anxieties. The cranes have a biological value that cannot be calculated in hard cash. Previous losses, to power lines, illness and predators, have had an impact not unlike bereavement on the organisation's tough-minded but soft-hearted crew. I climbed the wooden tower overlooking the wetland in Necedah, where the young whoopers had spent the summer. Dimly visible in the pale predawn light, a group of cranes was roosting in shallow water off a sand spit. These were sandhill cranes, cousins to the whooping cranes, as abundant as the latter are rare. In swathes of mist, tinged the faintest pink by the first rays of sunlight, the sandhills begin taking delicate steps, lovely as a Japanese painting. A trumpeter swan uttered its haunting call nearby.
This timeless image of wilderness was abruptly broken by the sound of an engine. A tiny flying machine came into view just above the skyline. It might have been designed by Leonardo da Vinci, being little more than a seat suspended from a primitive wing, powered by a single propeller. Seven small specks were spread out beyond one wing tip, which gradually took the form of whooping cranes. Another trike came into view, with five cranes in tow, then a third with three. (The 16th bird was recovering from an operation; it would make the first stages of the migration in a crate.)
The long journey south seemed well under way at last. Or not so well, perhaps. Even on the best of days, like this one, things can go wrong, as the sudden drone of a returning trike reminded us. Five of the young birds had simply decided they did not want to leave home, and they had turned back. After making several circles to try to change their minds, the pilot headed back south, but only one crane followed him. The other four returned to their pen, making white and inky-black pen strokes with their wing tips against the sky. They would have to be captured, boxed and driven to the next stop-off, in the hope that they would fly with the flock the next day. The other birds and their minders had a long slog ahead, greatly lengthened by the constraints of the less than ideal partnership between plane and crane.
A young crane will normally learn to migrate by following its biological parents, and it could cover the distance to Florida in less than a week. Yet the journey with the microlights was projected to take at least five times that long, and not just because of the many non-flying days dictated by unsuitable weather.
In natural migration the cranes soar on the rising columns of warm air known as thermals, covering great distances without having to expend too much energy flapping their wings. But thermals present nightmare flying conditions for aircraft-assisted migration, so the birds have to flap every inch of the way, an exertion that normally limits a day's flight to less than 50 miles.
I caught up with the flock again two stop-offs later, at Sweet Freedom Farm in the Baraboo hills of Wisconsin, where Jeff Huxmann introduced me to the birds in the pen. The farm is owned by Dick and Jane Dana, former Coca-Cola marketing executives who now devote much of their time to restoring prairie habitat on land long lost to agriculture. Prairie restoration is an increasingly popular trend with Midwestern environmentalists.
Unsurprisingly, the Danas love being part of a cutting-edge eco-project such as Whooping Crane Eastern Partnership, and they put on a mighty hospitable party for the pilots and ground crew, which includes drivers, technicians, biologists and educators, as well as Huxmann and Heather Ray. The group is bound by a camaraderie not unlike that of a touring theatre company. They travel hard, work hard and sleep (very little) in trailers (and in motels when they're lucky). They are also bound by a shared passion for this extraordinary opportunity to restore a magnificent bird to some small part of its place in North American nature. They know how to party, too.
They were joined on Sweet Freedom Farm by staff from the International Crane Foundation. Among them was Dr George Archibald, the foundation's legendary co-founder, who features prominently in The Birds of Heaven, Peter Matthiessen's luminous and enthralling account of the battle to save the world's 15 species of crane. Archibald has played a bigger part in that battle than any other individual, travelling tirelessly around the globe. He has made it his life's mission to ensure that these "symbols of our untameable past", as the founding father of US environmentalism, Aldo Leopold, put it, still have a place in the present and the future.
A great deal of drama is involved in flying with these vulnerable but independent-minded birds; constant potential for lethal collisions. At the party on Sweet Freedom Farm, Joe Duff told Archibald about a split-second crisis the previous year, when one of his charges flew straight at him, having baulked at flying over a noisy highway. "I stayed steady; the crane elegantly flipped up and rolled on its wing tip, bled off all its speed and settled into third position in the formation behind me," he recalled laconically.
Archibald listened with a mixture of fascination and horror. He manages to combine a boyish love for each crane he encounters - he has been known to join captive cranes in courtship dances - with a scientific global strategy for protecting the genus. He admits that it took a lot of hard thinking to persuade him to back a plan in which the stakes are as high as they are in aircraft-assisted migration lessons.
Later, Dick Dana invited us to his den on the third floor of an exquisitely converted red barn, that icon of Midwestern rural architecture. He produced a percussion instrument for everyone present, then put The Moody Blues' In Search of the Lost Chord on the sound system. Who said the 1960s were dead?
I had to migrate to New York myself on other business the next morning. I did not catch up with the cranes and their minders again until they were a long way south. This time the social as well as the geographical environment was very different. Surface-to-air missiles - happily, decommissioned - were part of the scenery.
Over the intervening six weeks I had followed the migration on the web - check it out, at www.operationmigration.com - through Illinois and Tennessee. In late November the group had a long hold-up at Hiwassee Wildlife Refuge, near the Tennessee-Georgia state line. The wind just would not blow right, it seemed, but the delay bought me time to escape from commitments in Nebraska and fly to Atlanta. From there I could drive north and, with luck, connect with the birds as they flew south.
At 7am the next day, in a motel somewhere on that route north, my phone rang. It was not Heather Ray, as I had expected, but Garry Kenworthy, a man I had never met, inviting me to have breakfast on his farm as the cranes arrived. I found the Kenworthy place easily enough, ignoring the radio exhortations of half a dozen Bible-believing churches to worship with them en route. It was a glorious autumn morning, and the sign on the farm gate, "Welcome to Paradise", seemed appropriate. A metal cowboy silhouette in black, with a red silk bandana, nonchalantly chewing a straw, suggested a life of productive indolence. Alas, there was to be no time to linger there. Getting out of the car in the farmyard, I heard a microlight overhead. There was one of the pilots, flying very high, with several cranes twinkling behind his wing tip as the low sunlight caught them.
The timing seemed too good to be true - and it was. I was directed to the landing strip, where Ray had just arrived. We introduced ourselves to Kenworthy and his wife. They were ecstatic at the prospect of entertaining the crane migration. They planned to serve beer with breakfast - to the humans, at any rate. This sounded just fine in the Bible Belt, where you can't buy booze in a Wal-Mart if it is within 300m of a church.The cranes had other ideas. It was such a fine morning, with such favourable winds, that they kept flying, climbing a steep ridge of hills so the pilots could lead them to the next farm on the route. With hasty goodbyes to the crestfallen Kenworthys, I chased Ray's yellow Ford back south.
That was where the missiles came in. Our next hosts were air-force people, with a son in Iraq. The missiles were a gift from his regimental buddies, who sometimes trained on the farm. Conservation is a broad church, I was learning, which is no bad thing. And the welcome could not have been warmer, with tea specially made in a brown pot for the visiting Irishman, and presents of home- produced honey on departure. I didn't mention the war once. Honest.
A perfect dawn the next day saw a perfect departure, all 16 birds flying firmly after Joe Duff's microlight. They were close to having adult, all-white body plumage now. As they flew up from the shadowland of the holding field into the dawn sunlight, that whiteness reflected a gorgeous shift from soft grey to warm pink.
Once again birds and pilots made good progress, and Ray phoned back to tell me to skip the next stop-off and head for a town called Buena Vista. One of the crew gave me rough directions to the landing strip. As there was no way I would make it before the birds, I decided to time my arrival for early evening, taking in some of the strangeness of rural Georgia at leisure en route.
And strange it was. It was not just that clusters of churches, with messages such as "God responds to knee-mail", stood sentry at each town. More telling was the grinding poverty of many of the hamlets. Rows of abandoned houses sometimes sank back into the earth, bushes growing through their broken windows. Out in the country, fancy mansions flew the Confederate flag. At Buena Vista I asked at the petrol station for a hotel. "This here is Boo-ina Veesta, honey," the lady told me sadly. "Ain't never been no hotel here."
Finding one was a small problem compared with finding the cranes and their entourage. My instructions - or my misreading of them - led me down overgrown forest tracks. Heavily armed hunters in camouflage fatigues looked understandably baffled, and then increasingly suspicious, when I asked where I might find a landing strip suitable for cranes. I began to feel like a furtive cocaine smuggler, and headed back for the highway.
Eventually I made phone contact with Ray, to find the cranes had flown on to yet another stop-off further south - more than 320km (200 miles), a record for this or any previous year. I caught up with the crew just in time for a celebratory pizza and a restorative shot of vodka.
We all rose five hours later to weather that promised further progress towards Florida, now tantalisingly close. "It's a new day," Joe Duff told his colleagues at the briefing. "Get the butterflies in your stomach in a row and fly." It is all too easy to forget that these guys, who make it all look so easy in the air, take their lives in their hands every time they taxi towards the crane pen.
We waited in a dark and frosty field for dawn. First light revealed patches of white at our feet. It was not snow, as I sleepily imagined at first, but frosted cotton. A few minutes later the microlights were aloft, but it looked bad: the wind had shifted and was blowing them backwards.
That strange and disturbing sight was my last image of Operation Migration, as my own flight that day, to take me north again, took off from Atlanta four hours later. But, happily, it is not a representative one. Six days later the trikes led the cranes into Chassahowitzka National Wildlife Refuge, in Citrus County, Florida. There they spent the winter, usually (and voluntarily) roosting in a pen that protected them from their most successful local predators, bobcats. Otherwise they were now wild creatures, living in the wild.
That was a great achievement, but the real miracle is what followed. In the spring each of these yearlings migrated back to the Midwest unaided and of their own accord, some of them all the way back to the reserve in Necedah where they had been reared.
Of 52 cranes that have made aircraft-assisted first migrations to Florida since 2001, 42 survive in the wild. As cranes do not breed until they are at least four, it is still too early to say whether this flock can regenerate itself. But a healthy start has been made.
And, even as you read this, the sound of microlights is leading this year's flock of youngsters into flight. Migration should start in a fortnight or so.
The story will repeat itself until Whooping Crane Eastern Partnership finds that enough cranes are breeding to make the flock self-sufficient. Only then will it be confident that the evocative bugle calls that give the birds their name will again be heard annually over the Mississippi flyway, for the first time in more than 100 years.