Our Window on Nature

We began tracking whooping cranes in the late 70s, and wrote this article in 1983. But last week we found a wonderful video from National Geographic where you can see how these magnificent birds are “trained” to migrate following an ultra-lite aircraft.
There have been great success stories in the whooping crane recovery saga, with their numbers now approaching 500. Watch some terrific air photography as this group of cranes train for their two-month journey from Wisconsin to Florida. It’s taking place right now. (Link for the video at the end of the article.)

The best publicized bird on the endangered species list must be the whooping crane. We began following their story in 1979 with a visit to the whooper’s wintering grounds in Texas. With a wingspan of 6 1/2 to 7 1/2 feet, these huge white birds have come to symbolize the precarious position of much of the wildlife in our modern world.

Although the plight of the whooping crane is well known, few people are aware of the effort being invested in the foster parent program. Its purpose is to increase the chances for survival of North America’s tallest bird. (Read the rest …)

Here’s a shocker. The Sooty Shearwater, an 18” long seabird, migrates up to 40,000 miles a year, along a route that crosses the Pacific Ocean.

Working down in New Zealand, a crew of UC Santa Cruz biologists electronically tagged the legs of 33 shearwaters in early 2005. They recovered working tags when over half of them returned, carrying a record of where each bird flew.

Leaving in April, the Shearwaters crossed the Pacific Ocean (about 500 miles), pausing long enough to grab enough fish, squid, and krill to keep them alive. Part of their food they could gather from the ocean surface – to get the rest, they had to dive up to 200 feet into the water!

Sooner or later all the tagged birds landed to spend their winter in one of three areas - off the coast of Japan, Alaska, or California.

There was no traveling from place to place – each bird started south from its own wintering area. And all the tagged Shearwaters crossed the equator within a 10-day period in October. Is that impressive, or what!