Last week, I discussed the second year of trying to teach trumpeter swans a migration route from Western New York to the Chesapeake Bay area in Virginia with ultralight planes. The first year didn’t go well but with some positive changes in the project, the second year looked good. The birds were really flying well and often. However, Mother Nature threw another wrench into the project when winter came early and the birds could not be flown the whole way to Chesapeake Bay. Instead, they were again trucked part of the way, and flown at various stops along the route to familiarize them with the surrounding terrain in hopes that the swans could connect the dots come spring and fly back to us in New York.
Come spring, the birds did get restless and they flew at the bay, but they did not head to us in New York. One bird, Glory (neck band R29), did fly up to us but missed the Game Farm by 50 miles, arriving at a park in Rochester. Thanks to his yellow neck band, eventually his position was reported to the project leader, and I was asked to head to that park to see if I could capture him. I located Glory and after a lengthy “confidence meeting,” I was able to capture him with a flying tackle.
Swans, like Canada geese, have bone spurs on the leading edge of their mid-wing bone joints and often use them to defend themselves by grabbing an aggressor with their strong bill and holding on as they beat the heck out of the aggressor with those wing bone spurs. I had been beaten up by geese this way years ago, so I knew that when I grabbed Glory, his wings had to be secured to his body before he could open them. That was done during the flying tackle but my pinky finger was caught on the edge of the log he was next to and the joint was seriously sprained. (I paid for that for a few weeks!)
When I reported the capture to Dr. Sladen, the project leader in Virginia, he asked me to truck Glory back to Virginia, which I did. Glory and the rest of his flock would spend the rest of their lives at the Environmental Studies at Airlie, a research institute in Virginia. The ultra swan project was finished.
In reality, the long-term goal of the Canada-based training team Operation Migration, which started the ultralight training program with Canada geese, was to teach an East Coast migration route to whooping cranes, an endangered species found only in Texas and Alberta, Canada, at the time. That project started in 2001 with the flying of sandhill cranes, which are very similar to whooping cranes, from Wisconsin to Florida. Brooke Pennypacker, the lead flier in the ultra swan project, was also involved in this project and kept in touch with me. The training and migration of sandhill cranes went well, so they advanced to whooping cranes.
The whooping crane is a large, all white crane with a red-capped head. The population was estimated to be down to 14 birds in 1941 due to market hunting and loss of habitat. Thanks to intensive conservation measures and collaboration between Canada and the United States, the species was brought back from the brink of extinction. When whooping crane was listed as an endangered species in 1967, only 50 birds remained, 43 of which wintered at the Aransas National Wildlife Refuge in Texas. Today it is estimated by the U.S. National Wildlife Service that there are 557 whooping cranes wintering at the Aransas refuge and spending summers in Alberta, Canada. Including three introduced flocks and in-captivity flocks, only 830 of these huge white birds now exist; they’re one of the rarest birds in the world. With the ongoing slow increase in the population now, hopefully these majestic birds will be with us in the future.
As far as the ultralight plane work done by Operation Migration with whooping cranes, it was both a success and a failure. Birds were successfully flown to Florida for a number of years but things were not happening as hoped. The birds were not reproducing, had not learned basic survival skills (there were no adult parents to teach them) and the population was diminishing due to tornadoes and predators such as alligators. In 2016, citing the near-total failure of the hand-raised and guided birds to reproduce in the wild, as well as the predation there, USFWS decided to stop the ultralight program. In 2018, the size of the Florida whooping crane population was estimated to be 102 birds, and that dropped to 86 birds in 2020.
The good news is the whooping crane population is still increasing in other areas and we will hopefully have them with us in the future.
As for trumpeter swans, birds from a restoration project based in Ontario, Canada, have adapted our area to raise their young and are now increasing here.