Number 9

The area birding community has been all a-twitter since a migrating whooping crane came to pay us a visit.  There are only about 550 whoopers left, and only 100 in the Eastern Migratory Population, so this is a pretty exciting event.  Birders are grabbing their binoculars and flocking to the UF Beef Teaching Unit, which is always home to hundreds of sandhill cranes this time of year.  The whooper, tall, regal and brilliant white, stands out like royalty among the smaller and darker sandhills.  He's been here for 10 days now and seems to like it.

If you are a whooping crane, there is not much about your life that is private.  This particular whooper had a red and white tag on his left leg and a green tag on his right leg, identifying him as #9-2013, the last and youngest chick to be selected for Operation Migration's Class of 2013.

Whooping cranes came perilously close to extinction in the 1940s, when only 15 wild migrating whoopers remained.  All of these belonged to what is known as the Western Flock, which divide their time between northwestern Canada and the Gulf Coast of Texas.  Today the Western Flock numbers more than 200, and an effort is being made to introduce a second wild population that migrates from Wisconsin to Florida.  Under the auspices of the Whooping Crane Eastern Partnership,  eggs laid by captive bird populations are hatched in incubators, raised by humans in costumes, and transported to Wisconsin each June.  There they are trained by Operation Migration to follow ultralight aircraft in a fall migration to Florida. Their arrival at St. Mark's Wildlife Refuge on Apalachee Bay is an annual event, with hundreds of people turning out to see the cranes arrive.

According to Journey North, a program of the Annenberg Foundation that tracks seasonal migrations, "Crane chick #9-13 was hatched from an egg rescued from the abandoned nest of the Wisconsin pair #24-08 and 14-08. ... He became part of the [migrating Class of 2013] when chick #6 got sick and had to be replaced. The first few weeks the team worried that #9 had aggression issues. He kept pecking at his puppet so hard it had to be taken away. The team was relieved when #9-13 began walking with the other chicks. Chick #9 turned out okay after all."

His cohort began their migration south on October 2, 2013 and after some adventures and mis-adventures arrived at St. Mark's National Wildlife Refuge on January 5, 2014.  Little #9, the youngest of his class, had by this time grown to be the largest of the eight birds.  That spring, six of the group including #9 made it safely back to their grounds in Wisconsin in an unaided migration. Although the cohort stayed together though the summer and early fall, #9 went off on his own in October.  He began his second southward migration on November 13, 2014, the same day as the rest of his group, but independently, departing from a different county and flying alone.  He was sighted in Kentucky on December 3, and made it to the Beef Teaching Unit here in Gainesville on December 11.

The Beef Teaching Unit is a 65-acre farm owned by the University of Florida and used in teaching Animal Sciences classes.  It is home to 35 cows of various types and, during migrating season, hundreds of sandhill cranes, earning its nickname "Sandhill Station".  The BTU is a strange oasis in the midst of an area heavily populated by students and surrounded by apartment complexes.  It isn't open to the public and there is no nearby parking, but every morning these days you'll find a cadre of birders on the sidewalk with binoculars and telephoto lenses looking at #9.

He really is impressive.  Adult whoopers stand five feet tall, just like me, and are the largest North American bird.  They have a wingspan of 7.5 feet.   At rest they look blindingly white, with long black bills and long black legs.   In flight their beautiful black wingtips are visible.  The species was named for the distinctive sound of its call.  I'd love to hear #9, but he hasn't made a peep the times I've seen him.   The Cornell Lab of Ornithology has a whooper recording you can hear.

Operation Migration tracks the distribution of whooping cranes in the eastern migratory population.  In mid-December they reported 97 birds (54 males and 43 females) including 47 in Indiana, 7 each in Illinois, Kentucky and Tennessee, 11 in Alabama, 3 in Georgia, and 7 in Florida.  Their December 15 map shows 6 of the Florida birds on the Gulf Coast and one solitary bird smack in the middle of the state -- that's our #9.  Of course I think of him as my bird now, and I will track him and worry about him from now on.  Despite the many good organizations dedicated to restoring the crane population, the world is not always a friendly place for whoopers.  Bear, wolves, foxes and, in Florida, bobcats and alligators, are natural predators.  Whoopers have been killed by flying into power lines and shot by teenaged boys..  When you are Jewish, love does not set you free, it loads you up with a burden of care that you schlep around -- the labor of love.

The photo of #9 at the top of this post was taken by my good friend and birder extraordinaire Dalcio Dacaol.  Craig and I scrambled through the weeds and prickly vines in the back yard of a vacant house to take this much less adequate picture.  Still, you can see the real estate being shared by cattle and cranes, and a car on the opposite side of the BTU shows what a small space this actually is.

At the Point

I am writing this on the deck of our rented beach house at Alligator Point, overlooking the Gulf of Mexico.  Craig and I come here a few times a year, sometimes with friends and sometimes not.    Winter is the off season, and I haven't seen any other people on the Point the two days we've been here.  I have seen a few dozen dolphins and countless assorted sea birds, including brown pelicans, terns, sanderlings, willets, great blue herons, loons and gulls.  Monarch butterflies stop here in the fall on their way to Mexico, and there are still a fair number who must have decided to stay.  I know I would.

Alligator Point is a narrow spit of land just south of Ochlockonee Bay along Florida's Forgotten Coast.  On a map the Bay looks like someone poked a finger into the shoreline, separating St. Mark's Wildlife Refuge to the north from Bald Point State Park to the south.  Alligator Point attaches to the eastern end of Bald Point and runs westward for eight miles before ending in a bird sanctuary.  There are no stores or restaurants on the Point, only ocean, beach, dune grasses, beach houses, and a two-lane road running from one end to the other.

The closest town is Panacea, just across the Ochlockonee Bay in Wakulla County.  Founded as Smith Springs, the name was changed to Panacea in 1889 to promote the health benefits of the many natural mineral springs that bubbled up from the ground into ponds. The area became a tourist destination with a hotel, baths, pavilions and restaurants.  Unfortunately the double whammy of the Great Depression and a hurricane in 1928 put an end to prosperity and the springs fell into neglect.  Today, according to Wikipedia, "some appear as potholes."

Panacea is now a fishing village with a population of about 950 and a different set of charms.  There is a small IGA, a large bait and tackle shop, a hardware store, and a handful of restaurants serving fish caught the same day.  There are also a fair number of fish markets.  Our favorite is just a walk-in cooler where a few boats bring their daily catch and the guy out front will slice off a chuck of grouper any size you want.

Panacea also boasts the Gulf Specimen Marine Laboratories which supplies marine creatures to schools and researchers and has an aquarium open to the public.  GSML was founded by environmentalist Jack Rudloe, who is still the Managing Director.  Rudloe is known for many things, including the first live exhibit of the giant sea roach, research on fouling organisms (look it up), and an unlikely correspondence with John Steinbeck in the 1960s. The aquarium is small but fun; it specializes in small invertebrates like starfish and sea pansies.

The nearby town of Sopchoppy is smaller than Panacea but better known because of the world-famous Sopchoppy Worm Gruntin' Festival held annually the second Sunday of April.  In case you don't know, worm grunting is a way of coaxing earthworms to the surface by rubbing a stob with a rooping iron.  (If you still don't know, check out this video.)  Catching worms for bait is one of the major industries in Sopchoppy, the other being the production of tupelo honey.  Tupelo honey comes from the blossoms of a swamp gum that only flowers for a few weeks in the spring, so to make pure tupelo honey you have to set clean hives out into the swamp at exactly the right time.  It is only produced commercially along the Chipola and Apalachicola Rivers.

As I'm typing this, a flotilla of white pelicans is sailing, almost drifting, along the shoreline in front of our house.  It's almost time for a glass of wine on the deck.  Later we'll go to a seafood restaurant that looks out over Ochlockonee Bay.  We hope to get back while there's still enough light to walk down the beach to the bird sanctuary.  I heard that when a Panacea resident was asked by a tourist, "How far is it to Disney World?" he replied "Not far enough."  I can't wait for someone to ask me.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=7Qro_Gn7Gdg