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.