Final Crane Released At Refuge

The last of four whooping cranes that followed an ultralight plane on a fall migration from Idaho was released here Wednesday, joining thousands of wild cranes.

Three of the four whooping cranes roosted with wild sandhill cranes Tuesday night, project biologist Jim Lewis said, but the fourth whooper, which had been injured by an eagle last week over Utah, hung back and had to be recaptured for another try Wednesday.

“Things are going good,” Lewis said. “All the birds were on the river roost except for the one that was hurt by the eagle. That one didn’t go over, so we picked it up and held it for the night.”

On Wednesday morning, he said, “we released it with its buddies.”

The female whooper was struck on the leg by a golden eagle last Thursday over Price, Utah, requiring stitches and antibiotics. It finished the trek to the Bosque del Apache, 90 miles south of Albuquerque, in a trailer towed by the ground crew.

But on Wednesday it flew again, said Lewis, who was a member of the ground crew and who is a former national whooping crane coordinator for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

“The last time we checked, they were all together and with the wild birds,” he said of the 11 birds brought south from Idaho. In the past 56 years, the whooping crane has made a dramatic recovery from near extinction, Lewis said. In 1941, there were just 16 birds in the last remaining migratory flock summering in Canada and wintering along the Texas Gulf coast, and only six other individuals in a nonmigratory flock.

An apparently successful method of teaching whoopers to migrate was demonstrated Tuesday as three of the majestic white birds flapped in behind an ultralight plane piloted by rancher-researcher Kent Clegg of Grace, Idaho.

Clegg, who has worked with cranes for 20 years, led the flock on a nine-day, 800-mile odyssey designed to test whether whoopers would follow an ultralight.

The following fields overflowed: DATELINE = BOSQUE DEL APACHE NATIONAL WILDLIFE REFUGE, N.M.