A Glimpse of Michigan's One and Only Whooping Crane

I learned about him on my first visit to the crane sanctuary.

On my first visit to the sanctuary back in early October, I was impressed by the group of half a dozen or so very serious looking birders, speaking in hushed voices and staring at an empty sky through high powered binoculars and telescopes. I felt awkward and out of place, kind of like I had accidentally stumbled into a church in the middle of a worship service.  I tiptoed around them and went off to explore the woods by Eagle lake.

It was still too early in the season for the major flying of the sandhill cranes as they gather together to migrate south. Other than a few small flocks of cranes and some Canadian geese, there weren't many birds around. I couldn't help but wonder what it was these people were so intently looking for. I had a hard time believeing they were that interested in sandhill cranes--if you want a good  view of sandhill cranes, all you have to do around here is drive down a road by a corn field.

As I was exploring off the trails, I came across someone else who was hiking off trails and we struck up a conversation. He told me that they were on the outlook for a whooping crane that was flying with the sandhill cranes. The large white whooping crane had been seen each night for the past week coming in to roost in the marsh in the sanctuary. I had never heard of a whooping crane before, but I was informed that it was a very rare bird, and it was a very exciting and amazing thing to have one in Michigan.

Turns out the this whooping crane is one of maybe three hundred wild whooping cranes in the world and appears to be the one and only whooping crane in Michigan. Whooping cranes are an endangered species that are being reintroduced to the wild by Operation Migration, a group of dedicated people who teach the young whooping cranes how to live in the wild and how to migrate south in the winter.  They use ultralight aircraft to guide the birds on their first migratory flight.

Today on my way home from work, I spotted a patch of white in the middle of flock of sandhill cranes in a corn field and got my first glimpse of the whooping crane. These photos where taken from at least two thousand feet away, so please pardon the blurriness.

I've spent most of this evening on the internet trying to track down the number of this crane. Operation Migration gives each crane a number and permanent bands on the legs to to make it easier to track them. They also have a bio and photo of each crane they have hatched, even the ones that died very young, on their website.

It turns out he is DAR 37-07. (DAR stands for direct autumn release--he was part of a group of young birds that were released with older birds in the hopes they would learn how to migrate by following the adults--as opposed to being taught to migrate by following the ultralight aircraft.) It looks like he might make Michigan his summer home. It is the males who pick a nesting territory and bring their mates home. Males begin looking for a mate when they are three to four years old. He was born in 2007 so it is possible he may bring a mate back to Michigan with him next spring. Whooping cranes can live 25 to 30 years and mate for life. They usually lay two eggs, but so far not many of the eggs in the wild have hatched. But even if they do hatch, the survival rate for the wild chicks so far has been very low. For an example, this year seven young cranes hatched in wild this spring, but only two survived summer for the migratory flight this fall.

Another very blurry photo, but if you look closely you can see the bands on his legs--right leg is Red/Green, left leg is Red/Green/White. The colors match up with DAR 37-07's colors.

The only other crane that I can find that was know to have spent a significant amount of time in  this part of Michigan was number 516--and he actually has an interesting story which you can read here.  But sadly he hasn't been seen in either Michigan or Florida since 2008, and is presumed dead. 516 is the crane that is pictured on the crane sanctuary's home page.