by Jon Mooallem
—
THE SCREEN DOOR of Joe Duff’s RV battered shut behind him. It was before dawn one morning in early October, at the migration’s starting point, the Necedah National Wildlife Refuge, northwest of Madison, Wisconsin. “We’re not going today,” Joe said, and brushed past one of the Japanese guys who’d been waiting at the door for him to appear.
Joe is tall with silver-threaded, wavy hair, bright gray-blue eyes, and high cheekbones that give him a flash of boyishness when he chooses to smile. When he doesn’t, like now, he can unintentionally project a detached and slightly smoldering intensity.
The three Japanese guys were television reporters. They were waiting to film the start of that fall’s migration for what they described as Japan’s equivalent of Good Morning America. Joe was away from the refuge when they’d arrived, and because reporters can get pushy and try to talk their way into putting on a white costume and getting close to the cranes, he’d warned one of Operation Migration’s other pilots before he left, “Don’t let them push you around.” This turned out to be unnecessary advice. The Japanese men seldom spoke and dispensed a small wrapped gift to every person they interviewed. Just before Joe stepped out of his trailer, the smallest of the men had been milling outside the door, considering and reconsidering whether it would be too presumptuous to knock.
The Japanese guys had been standing by in Necedah for a week already. When they arrived, Operation Migration was still going through its final preparations: dismantling equipment and sorting through the kitchens of their RVs, separating the boxes of pasta that mice had crapped in over the summer from the clean pasta. But after a few days, everyone was ready to go, and it was only a matter of catching the right weather. Now Joe made it clear that the weather still wasn’t right, and we’d all be waiting at least one more day.
The weather lords over Operation Migration like the gods in a Homeric epic, limiting or enabling their actions. Not every day that looks sunny and clear is a good flying day; not even most days are. Though wild cranes can fly the entire migration in as little as a week, swirling up to eight or ten thousand feet on columns of rising, warm air and coasting for miles, the trikes can’t keep up with the birds at such altitudes and must stay closer to the ground, forcing the birds to flap the whole way. And both the trikes and the cranes have fussy, sometimes opposing requirements as to the kinds of weather and wind they’ll fly in. Conditions need to be almost perfectly calm during a narrow window just after dawn. The slightest headwind can give the birds an excuse not to bother following the planes, or make the trip to the next stopover take so long that the birds won’t have enough stamina to make it. Even a tailwind can be the wrong kind of tailwind: if the air is too choppy, the trike wings will wobble and jerk, and the birds, unable to lock in, will eventually lose patience and land.
Consequently, everyone in Operation Migration obsessively consults his or her favorite esoteric weather report, but ultimately, no one places trust in any of them. And so a routine was now solidifying at Necedah. Before sunrise every morning, OM’s three pilots would stand outside at their campsite, under a sliver of moon, and stare silently at the trees, trying to discern any movement in the leaves, to gauge the wind speed and direction. Then the Japanese guys would pull into camp and hop out of their truck. One of them would say, “Joe, how is the weather?” and because the weather was inevitably not good enough to fly, they’d all be back in their truck within minutes, heading for their motel room to confront another day without a single commitment in central Wisconsin. This went on for several days. It got a little baffling. One morning, for example, the pilots reached an immediate and solid consensus that the day was a no-go, based on the agitated rustling of the trees. But I couldn’t see any rustling. “You can hear it,” a pilot named Brooke Pennypacker whispered to me. I couldn’t hear any rustling, either.
That fall, OM would be making its tenth whooping crane migration. There were, by that time, about a hundred older cranes flying around Necedah, the majority of them graduates of previous years’ journeys. Having each been shown the way once by the trikes, the cranes had been migrating back and forth by themselves every autumn and spring ever since, set in motion like so many sweeping pendulums. They’d soon begin heading south again. Occasionally, you’d spot their waiflike white shapes standing in the reeds far away. It was impressive—all that physical, free-ranging proof of the reintroduction’s success. And yet, as I was starting to understand, after a decade of work the entire project had now reached a dramatic, and not especially friendly, crossroads.
The reintroduction is overseen by a coalition of eighteen government agencies and nonprofits, including Operation Migration, called the Whooping Crane Eastern Partnership, or WCEP (pronounced “Wee-sep”). When WCEP formed, it was trying to help deliver the species from the throes of a crisis; the airplane idea, as odd as it looked, got more whooping cranes out onto the land, so they simply kept at it. “The reality,” one partner at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service told me, “is that, for much of the life of the project, we’ve more or less done this by the seat of our pants.” But despite having put some real distance between the bird and extinction by now, they’d never quite evolved out of that finger-in-the-dike mind-set. Earlier that year, an external review of WCEP had slammed the partnership for its “inertia to change . . . communication problems and internal politics.” There was too much gut instinct, not enough empiricism. “Underlying many of these problems,” the auditors wrote, “is a misunderstanding and poor appreciation of just what is science.”
So WCEP was now taking a step back—to question some of the assumptions that they hadn’t stopped to question before, run lots of studies, and think through the most efficient and cost-effective ways to go forward. At a series of meetings just before I arrived in Necedah, WCEP also totally reorganized itself, revamping the sometimes aggravating looseness of the organization into a proper bureaucracy, with different “teams,” and flowcharts demonstrating how the teams were supposed to communicate with one another and make decisions.
All of this reassured the scientists in the partnership; they tended to like flowcharts and wanted to learn everything they could about whooping cranes and keep rigorously refining the process. But there are no scientists in Operation Migration. They’re all laymen, all of whom had taken a circuitous route to crane conservation and uprooted their lives over the last decade. They basically wanted to keep plowing ahead and worried that—ten years and a hundred whooping cranes into the project—the more scientifically conservative attitude rising within WCEP could unnecessarily undermine the momentum they’d built. “We are not scientists,” Brooke told me. “We’re construction workers. We’re building a flock of whooping cranes. I’m not ashamed of that.” The partnership had always been full of hardheaded, passionate people—idealists with differing convictions about how to do the most good. (One member recalled facilitating a two-hour debate about whether to outfit the cranes with tracking bands that snapped around their legs, or bands that were glued on.) But negotiating this turning point had made a long-standing undercurrent of competitiveness between some of the WCEP partners even more glaring. There was especially a fairly widespread resentment of Operation Migration.
“OM has the ability to piss a lot of people off,” one government scientist in the partnership told me. Joe Duff, by his own admission, wasn’t always the easiest guy to work with. He knew he could be inflexible and in the past had been quick to lose his temper. But he also felt his team had an unfair reputation as glory hounds and egomaniacs. (They always got the majority of the media attention, simply because they were the ones flying the airplanes in front of the birds, he said.) Meanwhile, three key people at the Fish and Wildlife Service who’d been Operation Migration’s biggest champions in the partnership were now retiring. Joe had taken to calling these men “the patron saints of whooping cranes.” They’d understood that little about what was being attempted, and about some of the people attempting it, fit neatly into the stri
ctures of the existing wildlife bureaucracy. But for them, saving the crane was deeply personal—the central work of their careers. And so, without cutting corners exactly, they’d always found a way to move the recovery forward and keep the peace. Their replacements weren’t necessarily so accommodating or forgiving. One partner described the new guard to me as “dedicated bureaucrats,” rather than dedicated conservationists. “They want to preserve their jobs.”
One of these newcomers was Doug Staller. Staller, a high-energy guy with a military crew cut, had recently been made the new manager of the Necedah National Wildlife Refuge by the Fish and Wildlife Service. He was under the impression that his predecessor had cut Operation Migration too much slack. And so, that summer, Staller started restoring order. He had, for example, barred OM from training the cranes in certain areas of the refuge, claiming that the ultralights were bothering other species of birds. I’d noticed whooping crane banners on the light posts up and down Necedah’s struggling main drag. The wireless password at my motel was “whooping-crane.” But Staller didn’t seem to care about that sort of charisma or feel a special obligation to the whooping crane; instead, he kept invoking the “congressional mandate” of the refuge to be a sanctuary for all migratory waterfowl, equally. When we met, Staller even questioned why WCEP was going through all the fuss, dressing up in costumes and such, to pamper what were supposedly wild animals. “Actually,” he told me, “I have thought long and hard about bringing my two big Labradors out here on a long leash and—not catching a crane—but just chasing them,” to toughen them up.
I’d gone to see Staller my first morning in Necedah because, whereas guests used to come and go freely from Operation Migration’s little encampment of RVs on the refuge, Staller now required everyone to have a permit, issued through his office. He seldom issued them. He told me he worried that journalists like me would hang around with OM and get “seduced” by their celebrity, taking their side in the disagreements now weighing down the partnership. “This is biopolitics at its worst,” Staller said.
Staller was noncommittal when I asked him for a permit. Instead, he took me on a short drive around the refuge. We stopped periodically to look at ducks—it was obvious that Staller really likes ducks—and checked out some ditches and dikes.*
I spent the rest of the day running errands with Operation Migration. But I came back to Staller’s office before quitting time. Staller, knowing I’d been with the crew, stopped me in the doorway and looked into my eyes for a long, uncomfortable moment. Finally, he said, “You don’t look brainwashed.” Then he cracked a conspiratorial smile and handed me my permit, which is why I was able to stand at Operation Migration’s camp every morning and stare at the treetops in the dark.
—
THE FIRST DAY OF MIGRATION, when it finally came, started like every other day except that, after peering into the leaves for twenty minutes, the pilots decided that the weather looked good enough to give it a try, and everyone filed into vans and pickups, carrying their white whooping crane costumes under one arm, heading for the ultralight hangar.
Brooke was taking the first turn as lead pilot. While the other two trike pilots hung high in the air as spotters, he circled down toward an area of the refuge called Laskey Field, where the cranes had been shuttled a few days earlier as a staging area for departure. He landed so that his propeller faced the door of their pen and started broadcasting an MP3 of a whooping crane call from a bullhorn on his rear axle—the same croaking call that had been played to them at Patuxent. Then, with the birds popping up and down and tensing their wings inside the pen, two costumed interns opened the gate and rushed out of the way.
There were ten whooping cranes, all about six months old and four feet tall, still with patches of cinnamon-colored juvenile feathers that had yet to give way to white. They gathered in a mob behind Brooke’s trike as he rose out of Laskey Field. He managed to get four clinging to the tip of one wing, but within seconds they fell behind and scattered with the others. A few birds found their way back to Brooke, but again and again new cliques of rebels—three or four cranes at a time—kept breaking away.
They were heading for Site 4, the area of the refuge where they’d been penned for most of the summer—they were, in other words, going back home. Brooke kept circling back and maneuvering the edge of his wing in front of the cranes, trying to lure them. But any progress he made never lasted. The birds flapped away again. The formation would suddenly slacken, then dissolve, the way a school of fish dematerializes. “I’ll come down on the outside of them,” I heard Joe say on the radio at one point, swooping in to cut off a few deserters.
It was chaos. It was getting difficult even to keep track of the cranes. There were a few older whooping cranes in the vicinity, too, and also lines of wild sandhill cranes—the other species of North American crane, slightly smaller than the whoopers—commuting through the trikes’ airspace. Eventually, Brooke simply decided to follow the birds back to Site 4 and land with them, giving them a rest. He would shut down his trike, kneel on the ground in his costume, and hand out a few grapes for a snack; he’d let the birds feel in control for a moment, then try to get airborne again. But as soon as he landed, he saw one of the cranes hobbling at the other end of the grassy runway near the door to the old pen. Brooke was worried: the legs of young whooping cranes are fragile.
By now, Joe reported, the wind had shifted. The tailwind had become a headwind—a strong one. The first migration stop, a small family farm, was twenty-three miles to the south, and it was clear that they’d never be able to push that far even if the cranes suddenly cooperated. It would be another down day after all.
So Joe landed at Site 4, too, got out of his trike, and walked right past Brooke toward the injured bird. The scaly exterior at the bottom of its leg was torn off and raw. The bird needed to be coaxed into a crate and driven to a vet—it probably needed an X-ray. They whispered into the radio for another team member to come help and started herding the rest of the cranes into their old pen. They’d pen the birds here now and try to depart again tomorrow morning—weather permitting, of course.
Meanwhile, there was trouble back at Laskey Field, too. At the outset of the flight, Joe had spotted one crane that never got airborne with Brooke and asked OM’s third pilot, a Canadian metal sculptor named Richard van Heuvelen, to circle back and cajole it into the air. “I don’t know who it is,” Joe radioed, “but it never did fly.” It turned out to be crane number 2, the biggest and most willful of the cohort. Richard could see it, still lingering at the door to the pen. Richard considered his options. Then he called for someone on Operation Migration’s ground crew to let out the Swamp Monster.
If a bird refuses to launch, or abandons the lead trike and lands back at the pen, an OM operative will often throw a brownish tarp over him- or herself and run at the crane, crumpling the tarp loudly or blasting an air horn to scare it back into the air. They call the maneuver the Swamp Monster. But this time, when one of OM’s interns Swamp Monstered crane number 2, the bird didn’t shoot skyward and latch onto Richard’s wing; instead, it made a beeline straight into the oak trees bordering Laskey Field and hid. The intern took off the Swamp Monster tarp and pursued the crane on foot in his regular white costume—he was dressed as the reassuring parent figure again. But number 2 kept retreating farther into the woods. The intern kept approaching. Number 2 wanted no part of him. It was as though this bird had had a terrible epiphany.
This could have been the first day of migration. Instead, one crane was now injured and a second had apparently experienced some sort of crippling psychotic break in midair. And rather than migrate twenty-three miles to the first stopover point, Operation Migration managed only to take the birds back to the same pen they’d transferred them out of a few days earlier. “We went backwards,” Joe said.
12.
CRANIACS
In the early 1980s, thirty-five years after Josephine’s trysts with Pete and Crip at the zoo in New Orleans, Am
erica found itself swept up in another high-profile whooping crane love story—another bit of desperate matchmaking, which, if it worked, might afford the species a healthier future. The circumstances of this new couple, Tex and George, were even stranger: Tex was a female whooping crane; George was a human being.
At the time, the government biologists at the Patuxent Wildlife Research Center were honing their skills at breeding whoopers in captivity, trying to extract as many genetically healthy new birds as they could from the shrunken gene pool. Tex, who’d been born at the San Antonio Zoo in 1967, was valuable in this regard. As the sole offspring of two captive cranes that had lived in the wild, she potentially carried genes that no other captive bird did. There was a problem, however. Tex’s sibling had died after hatching—one account describes Tex’s mother sitting on the chick. So, as a precaution, the zoo’s director snatched Tex into protective custody, raising her for six weeks in a cardboard box in his family’s living room. Having barely seen her parents, or any other whooping cranes, Tex was left to imprint on the one animal she did see: the zookeeper—a dark-haired white man of medium build named Fred Stark. (“This is what happens to a lot of animals,” one researcher told me, explaining how easily imprinting can go wrong. “You know ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb’? It followed her everywhere? Well, the lamb imprinted on Mary.”) In short, Tex believed she was a human. She wouldn’t mate with other captive cranes—she wasn’t interested. But when a dark-haired white man of medium build walked past her pen, she would holler and grind.