Saving cranes

November days, when the weather and wind were right, found Sara Zimorski (Biology ’98) aloft in a Cessna 182, high above a small flock of whooping cranes as they made their way from Wisconsin to their winter home on Florida’s Gulf Coast.

She’s known these birds since they were chicks. As an aviculturist with the International Crane Foundation (ICF), she helped them mature into the wild creatures they are today.

The North American whooping crane population was never very big — fewer than 10,000 at its peak, before it began to dwindle rapidly during the second half of the 19th century — but by the winter of 1941–42 the species was down to 16 birds. Today, thanks to the work of Zimorski’s group and others, there are more than 420 in the United States and Canada today. There is hope that someday the whooping crane will no longer be an endangered species.

Part of the year Zimorski works near ICF at the Necedah National Wildlife Refuge in Wisconsin, where cranes are brought after being hatched in captivity. They are carefully nurtured and learn to fly by following an ultralight, a small, quiet aircraft that resembles a hang glider with wings.

The ultralight leads them on their first migration south, but they return home on their own. The flock Zimorski tracked this fall was traveling without human intervention.

“Cranes, like a lot of animals, can tame down pretty easily,” said Zimorski. They are up to five feet tall, with long pointy beaks and sharp toenails. “A bird that large that’s not afraid of people could get into trouble and could cause some damage.”

So when it’s time to feed or get close to the birds for some reason, the caretakers don big, baggy white crane suits with black rubber boots on their feet and a crane-head puppet on one arm. There’s a moveable beak for feeding the chicks.

“We don’t look much like a crane, but we don’t look like a person,” Zimorski said. Still, the cranes can tell who’s who, picking on the vet, whom they recognize by the white stripes on his boots.        

“In some ways whooping cranes are not very bright, but in other ways they’re very clever,” she said. Some are gentle, but others are downright nasty. “They all have their own personalities. You can’t help getting attached to them,” she said.

Heading to Florida, where she’ll spend part of her winter with the cranes, Zimorski finds herself in small towns near wildlife habitats, towns she otherwise might never see. Her job at this point is 24-7, and bad weather has stretched what could have been a five-day flight into almost as many weeks. If the weather’s good when she gets up in the morning, she checks for a signal from the transmitters the birds wear. “If I all of a sudden hear a beep, I know they’ve taken off, and we hop back on the plane.