by Jon Mooallem
George Archibald happened to be a dark-haired white man of medium build. A young ornithologist who’d worked with whooping cranes at the Patuxent Wildlife Research Center in Maryland, he had recently founded a nonprofit, the International Crane Foundation, with a friend in Baraboo, Wisconsin. In 1976, he convinced the government to ship Tex there, and when mating season started in the spring, George subdivided Tex’s enclosure with chicken wire and claimed half of it for himself. He put in a cot and lived there as Tex’s companion. They passed entire days together: foraging, gathering material for their nest, going on walks. And they danced. George would do deep knee bends and spring up with his arms out like wings. He’d issue loud whoops and shout, “Come on, Tex! Come on!” And soon he and Tex would be dancing together, just as wild cranes do during courtship. This would get Tex aroused—People magazine described George’s dancing as bringing Tex to “a fervid emotional climax”—and then when the crane stood motionless and extended her wings, two of George’s assistants would rush out from a hiding place with a syringe and inseminate Tex with the semen of another captive crane, flown in fresh daily from Patuxent.
George did this for three consecutive springs, because each year either the egg that Tex laid was infertile or the chick died while hatching. In 1982, he went back at it—for six straight weeks this time. He didn’t enjoy it. He was miserable, actually. (“I was getting a little bit weird,” he told me when I met him in Baraboo, though he wouldn’t elaborate.) He had a small shed at his disposal, to stay out of the rain, with a table, a typewriter, and a stack of books. But he spent a lot of time just staring numbly at the grass. That year, however, Tex laid an egg with George sitting beside her, and in early June the egg hatched. George named the chick Gee Whiz. A Los Angeles Times headline read: “Man, Crane Proud ‘Parents’ of Chick.”
George was flown to Los Angeles to appear on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. He knew the publicity was valuable, but suspected that he’d been invited on the show only to be made fun of. He is a private person, he told me, and understood how strange, or even indecent, the affair looked. “It was embarrassing for me. I mean, here was this guy living with a crane.” One of his heroes, the visionary ecologist Aldo Leopold, had written a famous essay about cranes in which he calls the bird “wildness incarnate”—a resident of an “untamable past” that we humans left behind. But here, one of those stately birds had been so pitifully marooned in the modern human world that it was practically married to a man—it was about to become a punch line on late-night television. While George waited in his hotel room in Los Angeles, leafing through his Bible for some reassuring scripture, the phone rang. It was a colleague back in Baraboo, calling to tell him that Tex was dead: a thirty-five-pound raccoon had torn into her pen and ripped her apart during the night.
As it turns out, the tragedy spared George any humiliation on television. It elevated the saga of George and Tex beyond ridicule. After fielding some questions on the air that night, George composed himself and announced, “Last night, while I was on my way to California, Tex was killed by a predator.” The studio audience was stunned and stopped giggling. Twenty-two million people were watching, and the poignancy of that moment arguably brought whooping cranes to a level of visibility and sympathy that they hadn’t had since the days of Josephine, two generations earlier. The story of George and Tex, a Washington Post editorial noted, showed what hard work could accomplish at a time when species were vanishing at a rate of one per day. “Gee Whiz’s birth,” the paper wrote, “is one tiny step in the other direction.”
But the truth was that no one working on the whooping crane recovery knew what the next step would be: how they’d ever manage to get these psychologically bungled whooping cranes out of the lab and into the wild, released from human custody untainted and unattached. It was a peculiar puzzle to have to solve. And as you might imagine, their ultimate solution—hiring airplane pilots in white suits—was reached at the end of a long chain of other, only marginally less unnerving ideas, each one building on the last.
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OPERATION MIGRATION traces its roots to a summer morning in 1985, three years after George’s appearance on The Tonight Show, when a man named William Lishman took his ultralight for a ride.
Lishman lives in a rural area of Ontario, northeast of Toronto, in a house that he designed himself. It’s a circular, domed cavern, almost completely underground, which, Lishman has said, provides his family “the security of a cave and the coziness of a cottage.” Lishman is an artist. His sculptures include a full-scale replica of Stonehenge built with old cars, and a life-sized metal Arnold Schwarzenegger, balled up as a fetus inside a twenty-two-foot-tall wire-frame uterus—a piece Lishman calls Hasta la Vista Baby.
Lishman had wanted to fly ever since he was a boy. All humans fantasize about flight, he says—it’s natural to look up at birds and feel envious. But Lishman’s feelings about birds move beyond envy, almost into reverence. In a memoir, he goes so far as to speculate that maybe, millennia ago, birds evolved into a technological civilization like our own, but then “thought it out well enough” and foresaw the kinds of societal and environmental problems that such a civilization would inevitably create for itself. So, instead, the birds learned to “engineer their own genetics” and evolved—albeit, seemingly backward—into the creatures we see today. They traded modernity for boundless, liberated lives. “They have no alarm clock making them report for work each day,” Lishman writes. No income tax or laundry. “Their comfort is self-contained, the only upkeep their feathers,” and they swish across the earth, following the best weather. He imagines all birds linked together by a vaguely telepathic “bird Internet,” and a flock as basically being a V-shaped kibbutz, where each individual can “enjoy the camaraderie of their kind and fly with far greater efficiency than if they traveled alone.”
I mention all this background to give some inkling of the mind-bending euphoria and freedom that Lishman felt that morning in 1985 when, flying his ultralight, he accidentally startled a flock of ducks into the air and found himself momentarily flying among them. The wild-looking man with a bristly brown beard was suddenly soaring inside a cloud of birds, sharing the air with them. It was as though he’d forged a living sculpture. He craved that closeness again. So he learned about imprinting and raised a brood of Canada geese, imprinting them on himself so that they’d follow him and his plane. Soon he was leading the geese on regular flights around his property, confusing and thrilling his neighbors. In 1989, he produced a short video called C’mon Geese, which is what he yelled at the birds from his cockpit to get them to follow.
It had now been seven years since George Archibald’s work with Tex, and those dreaming of reintroducing whooping cranes—of making them wild—had surmounted a few, but not all, of the roadblocks in their way. A big breakthrough had come after a psychologist named Robert Horwich approached George’s International Crane Foundation believing that a whooping crane’s freakish willingness to imprint on virtually anything might be turned into a tool to help the species, rather than just a hazard to be worked around, as it had been with Tex.
Horwich had never worked with birds before; he studied early psychological development in humans and other primates. But he suspected that young cranes went through the same developmental patterns of attachment as primates, and that understanding those phases would allow him to hack into the birds’ psychology, and manipulate them, by posing as their parent. To keep birds from imprinting on their human caretakers, researchers at the International Crane Foundation had started feeding newborn chicks with bird-shaped puppets, poked through the holes of high-walled boxes. Now Horwich wanted to actively—intentionally—get cranes imprinted on him. But he would wear a costume and never speak. This would allow him to act as the cranes’ surrogate parent for longer, teaching them more and more as they grew. The birds would never know that the creature they were following around was a human. George Archibald told Horwich to try it—he was not in a positio
n to laugh at odd ideas. But George added, “I don’t think cranes can be that dumb.”
In 1985, Horwich was given ten sandhill cranes, as proxies for whooping cranes, with which to run his experiment. He led them around the marshes at Necedah, wearing a gray sack and mask with some feathers sewn on the wing-arms. Soon he taught them to fly, running alongside them like a boy launching a kite. That fall, nearly all of Horwich’s sandhills followed older sandhills on migration; they returned to the refuge the next spring. They were still afraid of humans—still wild. Horwich hadn’t left a mark.
Still, conservationists were aiming to establish a brand-new population of whooping cranes, geographically separate from the last surviving one out west. And, unlike with Horwich’s sandhills at Necedah, in such a reintroduction there wouldn’t be any older whooping cranes around for the first, costume-reared generations to follow on migration—no older, more knowledgeable animals to show them the way. And even if there were older whooping cranes around, it seemed unlikely that they—not being a colonial species like sandhills, and bonded to only their own chicks—would tolerate these young interlopers, or that the younger birds would be interested in following the older ones in the first place. (Even now at Necedah, older whooping cranes often harass or attack Operation Migration’s latest class of juveniles.)
For years, there appeared to be no way around this problem. (Scientists had already tried outsourcing the job to sandhill cranes, switching out the eggs in sandhill nests in Idaho with whooping crane eggs and hoping that the more cordial sandhills would adopt the whooper chicks and teach them to migrate. But the young whooping cranes turned out to be sexually confused by their surrogate parents, in the same way that Tex had been by her zookeeper: they were attracted to the wrong species. No new whooping cranes were ever born during that fifteen-year experiment, though the birds did manage to produce one “whoop-hill” hybrid.) Then, one day, long after Robert Horwich had moved on from his job at the International Crane Foundation, he saw a picture in a magazine of an ultralight plane leading a flock of geese. The caption under the photo said very little about the ultralight pilot. But Horwich, grasping at another far-fetched idea, tried to write the man a letter anyway. He addressed the envelope: WILLIAM LISHMAN, THE GUY WHO FLIES WITH GEESE, BLACKSTOCK, ONTARIO CANADA.
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BY THAT TIME, George Archibald had been shown Lishman’s video, C’mon Geese, by a friend and was arranging meetings between the artist and other leading crane conservationists. Lishman had only wanted to fly with birds because it made him feel amazing, but he was intrigued that his new skill-set might be repurposed to do some good. It was unclear whether an ultralight could actually teach birds a migratory route, so, after some false starts, it was decided that, in the fall of 1993, as a test, Lishman would lead eighteen geese from his property in Ontario to a bird sanctuary four hundred miles away, in Virginia. Lishman needed another pilot. He asked a buddy of his from the ultralight circuit—a thrill-seeking, slightly cocky car photographer with a star in his tooth named Joe Duff.
Joe and Lishman made it to Virginia in seven days. The following spring, thirteen of the geese returned to Ontario on their own. The scheme worked, in other words: the birds had learned the route and could make the return trip themselves. The two pilots set up a nonprofit, Operation Migration, so they could fund more experiments and, over the next several years, did a number of progressively more ambitious migrations with geese and sandhill cranes. They migrated farther and farther, with more and more birds, then gradually phased out all talking during their trips and incorporated Robert Horwich’s costume idea to keep the birds from getting tamed down in the process. One autumn at a time, Duff and Lishman were building a case that—no matter how it might have looked to the Canadian and U.S. government agencies responsible for the whooping crane—these two artists in their funny airplanes could help resurrect one of the world’s most endangered birds.
The 1990s was actually a period of fervent experimentation in North American whooping cranedom, with government scientists and graduate students grasping at only slightly less far-fetched ideas to overcome the migration obstacle. They tried driving sandhill cranes—again, as a stand-in for whooping cranes—on a migration in a horse trailer. When the birds didn’t fly back, they drove them again, but stopped every fifteen or twenty-five miles along the way to let the cranes fly around for a few minutes, hoping this would orient them enough to connect the dots later. There were multiple attempts to imprint sandhills on an ambulance and then have the birds fly a migration behind it, swooping over back roads like police helicopters in an action movie car chase. Unfortunately, on one such trip, many birds got injured or killed when they flew into the power lines beside the road. (The researchers had mapped out a route that forced the birds to cross over power lines hundreds of times.)
By the end of the decade, there had been more than twenty different attempts to lead birds on a migration behind some sort of motorized vehicle. They tried everything. (At one point, a Russian artist was even commissioned to build a remote-controlled, super-sized whooping crane robot that could fly at the head of a flock.) But they ultimately conceded that nothing worked as well as the ultralights. And in the fall of 2001, a joint panel of U.S. and Canadian government agencies entrusted Operation Migration with whooping cranes, giving Joe and Lishman ten birds for their first migration to Florida. OM made the trip in forty-eight days. Joe told me that it’s still the fastest they’ve ever done it.
Joe was narrating this history for me over dinner one night at a steak-and-seafood joint in Necedah called the Reel Inn. The truth was, he explained, he’d fallen into conservation inadvertently. When Lishman asked him to join the first goose migration, back in 1993, he was newly divorced and bored. He’d started to suspect that he’d taken the life of a luxury car photographer as far as it could go, and was considering selling his studio and starting a marina in Ontario’s lake country with a friend. Joe had been watching Lishman work with the geese and was seduced for the same, essentially selfish reasons as his friend—for the thrill of flying with birds. But at some point, Joe looked up and found himself attending meetings of government biologists. He was filling out bureaucratic permit applications to wildlife agencies and typing up scientific papers about the ultralight migrations and publishing them in Proceedings of the North American Crane Workshop. He was committing himself to the work, in other words, with a determination that not many people who knew him at the time would have expected. Lishman would eventually get tired of the migrating lifestyle; he stopped flying with Operation Migration in 2004. But Joe was too invested to stop, even as he remarried and had a child, rebuilding his personal life in ways that made him want to stay closer to home. When I met Joe in Necedah, his daughter had just turned eleven. “It’s kind of normal for her, my being gone,” he said. “It’s getting harder, though.” Almost every autumn of her life, he has told her goodbye and spent the rest of the year flying away from her—very, very slowly.
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OPERATION MIGRATION FINALLY got its eleven whooping cranes out of Necedah two days after that botched first try. The trip through the rest of Wisconsin was typical and slow. There were fits of flying broken up by wind and rain, which stranded them at stopover sites for days at a time. On day nine, they crossed the border into Illinois, the first of many modest milestones on migration. But almost as soon as they did, the Midwest was blasted with a weather system of biblical fury, and OM found itself grounded northwest of Chicago, in Winnebago County, for what looked to be a long, long time.
There are chores to do on down days: feeding and checking the cranes, flushing the bowels of the RVs, and keeping a supply of fresh pumpkins in the pen for the birds to spear and stomp to stave off their boredom, and to keep them from spearing and stomping each other.* Crew members and other WCEP partners also visit schools along the route, fielding enthusiastic questions from little kids while standing in front of the blackboard in their full white regalia. (Classes around the Unite
d States and Canada follow each year’s migration on the Internet as part of their science curriculum.) When I tagged along on one visit, to a third-grade classroom in Reedsburg, Wisconsin, an Operation Migration intern closed her presentation by inviting the children to feed each other grapes with the beak of her crane puppet.
In the end, the crew wound up grounded in Winnebago County for eleven days, a new Operation Migration record for immobility. By the time they made the next stop, the migration was in its twenty-first day overall, and they’d traveled a total of 185 miles from Necedah—about a four-hour drive.
But OM slowly gained momentum through Illinois, soaring over the endless, checkered grid of early-harvested fields and the monstrous wind farms that, over the years, have multiplied in their path. Soon they were crossing into Kentucky, and south through the state into Marshall County, just shy of the Tennessee border. There they set the birds down on a soy farm owned by a boisterous old widow named Martha.
The landowners at every stopover have volunteered their property and get no compensation for letting the birds and the half-dozen motor homes and trucks accompanying them invade their land. They don’t know when OM will arrive exactly, and have no idea how long the weather will force them to stay. And, like everyone else, the landowners are prohibited from even seeing the birds and wind up barred from the portion of their own property where OM has hidden the pen. On top of everything, they’re asked to keep the entire affair a secret—no bragging to friends and neighbors, or posting pictures on Facebook—since, for security reasons, the public is not supposed to know the cranes’ exact where abouts. (OM asked that I not use any of the landowners’ full names.) Still, over the years, the crew has grown close to many of their host families, cobbling together genuinely warm relationships from just the few days when they visit together every autumn. For the crew, it can feel like stepping into a family portrait—a living Christmas card—and noting small differences from the previous year’s snapshot: Kids get bigger. Friendly old dogs disappear. A few years ago, OM was rerouting the southern half of its migration to avoid some tricky terrain and had to scout and recruit new stopover hosts. One of the pilots, Brooke Pennypacker, drove around knocking on doors with his girlfriend, explaining the whole story—the costumes, the airplanes, the top-secret flock of imperiled birds—trying to sound as sane as he could. And it was amazing, Brooke told me, how many people welcomed him in right away and said yes. Few of the hosts are hard-core environmentalists. “But they’re like a lot of people: they would help if they had the opportunity.”