Missing Whooper Found In Arizona

A whooping crane that strayed on its way south and has been missing for a couple of months has been spotted in Arizona, hanging out with sandhill cranes and feeding on grain.

Biologist-pilot Kent Clegg said Wednesday the bird had been spotted with a small group of sandhill cranes 22 miles north of Willcox, Ariz.

“It seems to be real happy; just in a different state,” he said by telephone from his home near Grace, Idaho.

The bird is one of four endangered whoopers that followed Clegg south to New Mexico in the fall of 1997 behind an ultralight craft in a migration experiment. Predators killed two of the birds at the Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge near Socorro, 90 miles south of Albuquerque. The surviving two went north to Idaho last spring, but only one returned to the Bosque del Apache this year.

The other hadn’t been seen since November, when it was spotted in the northwestern corner of New Mexico.

Willcox-area rancher John Holcomb told the Arizona Department of Game and Fish last week that he’d seen a whooping crane, Clegg said. The department’s John Bacorn verified it was the right bird, Clegg said.

The whooper is wearing a transmitter but its signals can’t be picked up beyond 20 miles, Clegg said.

Biologists had looked for the crane last month in Arizona and Mexico, but Clegg said they didn’t fly north of Willcox.

The white birds stand 5 feet tall with an 87-inch span on their black-tipped wings.

About 370 whoopers are known to exist. The only migratory flock, about 180 whoopers, flies between Canada and Aransas National Wildlife Refuge, Texas. Whoopers also live in a nonmigratory flock in Florida and in captivity at zoos and other facilities.