Doug Pellerin
Dressed in one of her crane costumes, Mary O’Brien got to interact with whooping crane colts in the training pen at the White River Marsh Wildlife Area.
Retired Madison environmental scientist Mary O’Brien has spent hundreds of hours sitting at her dining room table — surrounded by yards and yards of white fabric — carefully stitching together bird costumes.
“You can imagine this giant Teletubby white costume … Most people’s reaction was ‘What on Earth is going on here?’”
Those handmade costumes helped ultralight pilots hide their human identities and disguise themselves as oversized whooping cranes, leading flocks of the endangered birds south as part of Operation Migration. The nonprofit was a founding member of the Eastern Migratory Partnership, formed in 1999 to help restore a migrating population of whooping cranes in the Eastern United States.
“I always felt very proud to know that it was my stitches flying high in the air with all these whooping cranes all the way to Florida. And of course, very, very honored to be part of that all,” she says.
Starting in 2001, Operation Migration began receiving whooping crane chicks hatched at captive breeding sites across North America. Some eggs were also pulled from abandoned whooping crane nests. A joint partnership of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and Canadian Wildlife Service called the Whooping Crane Recovery Team oversees the allocation of chicks every year. The team is currently headed by a member of U.S. Fish and Wildlife.
“We raised the birds by hand. We wore costumes and didn’t talk in their presence. And they remained wild. But it was us they were looking to for guidance, and that’s what allowed us to lead them south,” explains Operation Migration co-founder and CEO Joe Duff.
The group started with just eight baby birds but was soon receiving up to 20 a year. By 2005, Operation Migration’s costumed ultralight pilots had led 76 young whooping cranes on their migration journey. And the unique effort was getting national attention.
“We’ve got an airplane in the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum, we’ve got one at EAA in Oshkosh. We’ve got one at Disney’s Animal Kingdom. We really brought a lot of attention to the plight of whooping cranes,” says Duff.
But the flights from Wisconsin to Florida were grounded in 2015 when the Recovery Team decided ultralight-led migration should end, insisting enough adult birds had learned the migration route to teach it to younger cranes. Then in August of this year, Operation Migration made a stunning announcement: the organization would be shutting down because it no longer believes a self-sustaining population of eastern migratory whooping cranes is attainable.
“Operation Migration is a nonprofit, and I just can’t justify taking money from our supporters if we have no faith it’s going to work,” says Duff. “If nothing changes, this population will die out.”
He points to a decision from the Recovery Team to move away from costume-rearing cranes and encourage parent-rearing, where chicks are placed with adult birds in captivity then eventually moved to wild nesting pairs. The hope is that a more natural approach to restoring the population will eventually produce birds that are better prepared to survive in the wild.
“[The change] is restrictive because there are only so many birds that can be raised in captivity using parent-rearing, and only so many pairs of whooping cranes to release them with,” Duff says. “So we’re down to limited numbers.”
The decision undercut nearly 20 years of work by Operation Migration, which relied on costume rearing techniques to raise whooping cranes first at Necedah Wildlife Refuge, then at White River Marsh Wildlife Area in eastern Wisconsin. The Recovery Team has also drastically reduced the number of chicks allocated to the Eastern Migratory population, asserting that it should now be close to self-sustaining. Duff believes that with so few new birds entering the population, numbers will begin to decline.
“We’re getting very few birds, in fact this year we’re only getting four altogether. Four parent-reared birds,” he says. “And that certainly can’t outweigh attrition. This population in just going to dwindle and dwindle and pretty soon it’ll be gone.”
Seventy-one-year-old Margaret Howden will never forget the first time she saw whooping cranes in flight, during a soaring takeoff over her Green County farm.
“The first time you saw the birds shoot out of that pen and follow the aircraft, I swear — I’m a tough old bird — and I started crying. Everyone around me started crying.”
Howden and her neighbors, who have a small airstrip on their farm, often hosted ultralight pilots and migrating whooping cranes on their long journey from central Wisconsin to Florida.
“The take-offs in the morning were right after daylight. And this would be usually in October, so it would be very cold,” she recalls. “Locals were invited to stand quietly, not speak. You’d have to hide behind trees and stuff. (Take off) is so impressive. And to know, at that time, that there had not been whooping cranes flying over Wisconsin for over 100 years. It just knocked your socks off.”
Now she fears that awesome sight of the gigantic birds gliding over Wisconsin will fade away once again. “I’m fucking furious at Fish and Wildlife.… They’re basically going to ruin 25 years of work,” Howden says. “There is no freaking way that that population will be able to maintain. All of this work — blood, sweat, tears, donations.”
Howden admits she’s not a scientist, but she insists it’s too soon to expect a population of just over 100 birds to withstand predators and swarms of black flies driving parents off their nests at the primary breeding area in Necedah, Wisconsin.
“I feel badly for the cranes. They would have had a chance and I don’t think they do now. They’re a natural part of the environment and they should have a chance to exist. We blew it. We could have done it, but we didn’t.”
As Operation Migration looks to wind down by the end of the year, Mary O’Brien says she isn’t ready to give up on Wisconsin’s whooping cranes just yet. She’s working to fill the giant hole the organization is leaving behind as advocates for Eastern Migratory whooping cranes. She points to its popular Field Journal blog.
“There are people all over the country who look forward to those stories, and on that basis, contribute a lot of money. It’s difficult to lose a huge advocate for the population and still hope there are the financial contributions and people are still interested in it.”
O’Brien has reached out to the International Crane Foundation in Baraboo with plans to help with its children’s programs.
“The International Crane Foundation will be huge in that regard because they already do a lot of outreach and programs for young people. We need to continue to get kids involved in this because they’re the next conservationists.”
The foundation has remained relatively quiet on the exit of Operation Migration. ICF chief operating officer Kim Smith believes there’s nothing wrong with trying a new approach in hopes of solving breeding problems within Wisconsin’s whooping crane population.
“One of the issues we have is that it has not been fledging chicks at the rate that we’d like to see them do. Although this year we’ve had the best year ever. We have five chicks on the ground fledging right now, which is astounding! We’ve had some years where we’d get one or two. We’re working on getting those fledglings to survive.”
And while she appreciates the work of Operation Migration, she says it may be time to move in a different direction.
“We just keep working at it until something works. We’re always trying new things. It’s a loss with Operation Migration, but changes happen.”
Duff is quick to point out that those five fledgling chicks owe a lot to the work of Operation Migration. Of those five chicks, there are 10 parents. And nine of the 10 parents were raised by Operation Migration volunteers in crane costumes.
O’Brien insists the contribution of Operation Migration cannot be overlooked, and continuing without it will be a major challenge in the fight to save whooping cranes.
“Just to watch them go up in the sky and head down toward their next stop in Illinois. I mean, there’s just nothing like it,” O’Brien says. “That’s what grabbed everybody’s hearts. That’s what got everybody to keep following this and contributing. It’s one of those things that brings out the best in people, and we kind of need that.”