Leggett: Whooping crane numbers steadily increasing on Texas coast

So, I’m out on the road for my daily walk when I hear, far off to the south, the musical trilling of a flight of sandhill cranes.

I tried to find them but they were far enough away that they appeared low in the sky and the sun was right in my eyes. That was a no go on the crane sighting.

But it did bring back memories of the thousands of wintering sandhills at Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge in southern New Mexico. This gem sits along the Rio Grande as it makes its way on down to El Paso and eventually along the Texas/Mexico border to the Gulf of Mexico.

Back in the early 1990s, I had the opportunity to visit the refuge and to view the cranes and even one lonely whooping crane that was traveling with them. That single whooper apparently was among the last surviving members of an experimental flock of whoopers that were placed among the sandhills when they were still in the egg.

The idea, back in the late 1970s when the flock was seeded, was to place the whooping crane eggs in sandhill nests and hope that they hatched and grew into mature adults that could augment the dwindling flock of whoopers wintering on the middle Texas coast around Rockport and Aransas National Wildlife Refuge.

The hatching part worked beautifully and there then grew a sort of a flock of whooping cranes that grew to adulthood and began migrating south each winter with their adopted sandhill parents. There was just one problem with the plan, though.

The whooping cranes grew up thinking they were sandhill cranes. They imprinted as chicks on the adults around them and that were standing over them when they hatched and those were the much more numerous sandhill cranes. It’s really a shame, too.

Whooping cranes are the tallest birds in North America, with a supremely loud whooping kind of call. The flock that winters in Texas is the only migrating group in North America and can be seen every winter along the shorelines of the Aransas National Wildlife Refuge north of Rockport and out on Matagorda and San Jose Islands offshore.

There are now whooping crane tours out of Rockport so that dudes who once fancied the birds’ feathers to make hats for snazzy ladies in the late 19th century can travel down and see one of the most endangered animals in the world.

Whooping crane numbers have increased steadily in the past 30 years and now there are 192 breeding pairs that winter each year in Texas. They migrate down from Wood Buffalo National Park way up in Canada. In 1941, just 15 birds remained of the migrating flock in Texas.

It’s a true success story we can only hope continues here in Texas, though the ongoing droughts we’ve been experiencing here have knocked a big hole in the cranes’ favorite food supply, blue crabs. The crabs live in the shallow waters of the coastal prairies where they are snapped up in the very large beaks the cranes carry around with them.

Their migration pattern roughly follows the trail of the Colorado River in Texas and several years ago, a whooping crane stopped short of the coast and spent most of the winter at Granger Lake near Taylor. The lake was way down that year and there was a theory that he was feeding on mussels exposed along the northern shore of the lake.

And it seems that every few years some pinhead shoots and kills one and has to be prosecuted and fined for killing an endangered species.

But I can’t forget that lone crane up there in New Mexico all those years ago. I photographed him in a shallow pond on the refuge along with various ducks, geese and sandhills. I couldn’t help but wonder whether he was lonely or was the imprint so strong that he never felt alone. Did he long for a mate to spend the rest of his life with?

Of course, I never knew and even though whoopers are extremely long-lived birds, he’s gone now and the experiment has failed. The last crane came to Bosque del Apache in 2001.

Here’s hoping the rest of his kind keep coming to Texas to spend the winter and fly back to Canada to raise more young cranes.