Last Sunday in Crane Lover Part Two, the sudden death of Pete left Josephine a widow, living
alone in the
breeding enclosure on the Aranasa National Wildlife Refuge. Bob Allen and
refuge manager, Julian Howard, were determined to find Jo another
partner. They didn’t have to look far. Allen remembered seeing a crane with a
damaged wing on the refuge who had summered-over the previous year, unable to
migrate. Allen and his assistant, Olaf Wallmo, tried to encircle the bird and capture
it. The crane had a different idea. Allen describes his encounter in his book On the Trail of Vanishing Birds. “We
never had a chance! Old Crip (short for cripple) calmly hiked up his bad wing
and, head high, started off with those steady 23 inch strides that a whooping
crane uses when he wants to run down a skittering blue crab or outwalk a couple
of boy scouts, which is what we soon felt like.”
Allen
wasn’t sure if Crip was still around, nor was Allen sure of the bird’s gender.
But he remembered the bird looking strong and healthy. Once Allen got the okay
from Audubon president John Baker, a posse was formed and the crippled crane
was located. Allen and Howard crossed their fingers as they released Crip into
the enclosure. Almost immediately Jo and Crip began their prenuptial dance. The
following March, the new couple had constructed a nest and on April 22, Jo
laid one egg.
In
the meantime, Baker had sent Allen to Mexico to check out some flamingos
sightings. When he returned home, a message was waiting. “The hatching date in
near.” He packed a fresh bag, threw it in the back of his station wagon, and
drove almost now-stop to Texas. Waiting for Allen at the refuge was the newly
formed Whooping Snooper Club, an unofficial group of refuge observers who had
divvied up the watch time on the observation tower. Also vying for room on the
tower were news reporters assigned to the whooping crane saga. Back in 1945
when the first search for the nesting site in Canada was conducted, the media
had jumped on the story and continued to follow any developments that occurred.
On May 8, Jo and Crip, appeared in four photos in Life magazine in an article entitled “Whooping Crane No. 38?” One photo showed Jo standing next to an
egg.
Before
dawn of May 25, Jo and Crip were fluttering near the nest. The tall grasses
prevented Allen and the other observers from seeing what the cranes were attending
to. As the sun lit up the sky, Allen spotted a fuzzy reddish brown ball
bouncing around the nest. He wrote, “He
was so tiny I could scarcely believe my eyes, but there he was, a
rusty-colored, downy little thing, moving about on the nest on wobbly legs and
being dutifully cared for by both parents. The miracle had happened! ‘Rusty,’
the first whooping crane ever hatched in captivity, had entered the world at an
unknown hour during the night of May 24-25.”
Was the captive breeding
program destined to be a success? Tune
in again next Sunday to find out the story’s conclusion.
For more details about the whooping crane
captive breeding program, check out chapter eight of my book The Man Who Saved the Whooping Crane: The
Robert Porter Allen Story. I like to describe the book as Indiana Jones
meets John J. Audubon. The book has been nominated for the following awards:
George
Perkins Marsh Award for environmental history
Washington
State Book Award for history/general nonfiction.
Labels: #audubon #whooping cranes #cranes #birds #endangered species #Aransas National Wildlife Refuge #birding #Operation Migration #birders, #birding #birdwatching
