9UNP1301_George_Archibald_WordPress

- So good morning everyone. Welcome to day, one, two, three of the Midwest Environmental Education Conference. My name's Carla Lockman, I'm the program leader at the Boston School Forest in the Steven's Point area school district, and a lifetime member of the Wisconsin Association for Environmental Education, so if you need to update your membership, or choose a life membership, I strongly suggest it. 

So I met this morning's speaker on the UW Fond du Lac campus nearly 10 years ago, during the Summer Prairie Festival Event, and it was a hot day. Our booths were next to one another, and we just started talking. We started up a conversation. He had asked me about my career and my schooling, I was interested to hear about the cranes and the International Crane Foundation and the work that they were doing. 

I had, of course, visited International Crane Foundation, also something I highly recommend doing if you haven't been there already. And I was excited to share my experiences and memories of that day with the cranes. And it was less than two weeks later that I get a letter in the mail, and I still have this letter today at home. It was from George Archibald, the co-founder of the International Crane Foundation. 

So, you mean that man that I talked to for three or four hours, the one who asked me about my career, the one who we just causally had conversations about cranes and travel, was the co-founder of the International Crane Foundation, and he wrote me a letter; a personal letter. "It was so nice taking with you." Really? I read it like three or four times and I said, "Oh my goodness, I had in the presence of royalty "and I didn't even know it." Well, I know it now. 

And it has been just a delight visiting with you again this morning for a few hours here; it's been wonderful. So, I've called the office of the International Crane Foundation nearly every year since I've been on the board, I'm not on the board anymore, but since I was on the board, and then past conferences, trying to get Mr. Archibald back for a keynote presentation. And he's always gone. Mongolia, Bhutan, Russia, nearly every continent that there are cranes, he's there and he's doing work. 

Well, and in fact, actually next week you are leaving for Bhutan and North Korea. So, this is the year. This is the year that he joins us for the Environmental Education Conference. So, on behalf of the Wisconsin Association for Environmental Education, I am pleased to introduce Mr. George Archibald. It his visionary leadership in international conservation efforts over the past 40 years that has given flight to crane conversations world wide. 

In 1973, when cranes were in a perilous situation, and many species were on the brink of extinction, Mr. Archibald, along with Cornell University colleague, Ron Sauey, established the International Crane Foundation in Baraboo, Wisconsin. The ICF is the world center for the study and preservation of cranes, and today ICF has over 50 employees. 

You might have seen last night, if you were here for the reception, one of the great volunteers was walking around in the whooping crane costume, picking out straws from drinks; wonderful, amazing.

It was very fun. So Mr. Archibald is a true conservation ambassador who uses his unique brand of crane diplomacy to support conservation projects in 45 countries. He leverages the charisma of cranes to unite people from diverse cultures to work together to preserve the landscapes necessary for the survival of both cranes and people. So. on behalf of the Wisconsin Association for Environmental Education, it is my distinct honor to introduce to you, Mr. 

George Archibald, this morning's Midwest Environmental Education Conference speaker and a true example of how we can celebrate our success stories in environmental education. 

(applause)

- Good morning. I'm really speaking to the choir today, so I feel quite inadequate. I can talk a lot about cranes, but I don't know much about environmental education.

 I'm a trained ecologists actually. I spend most of my time raising money to keep the Crane Foundation in the air. But I'll tell you a little bit about what we do around the world.

Today, I'm going to concentrate on early learning in cranes and how it effects their adult behavior, and how early experiences in my life influenced me to do what I'm doing. First I'll share with you a little video about cranes so you can appreciate how beautiful they are. 

(crane squawking)

(rhythmic piano music)

- 

[Video]

 When you see a crane, it can be very spiritual.

- They really are breathtaking, to hear them, there's something really magical about them.

- 

[George]

 Every time I look at a crane, I'm sort of in awe.

- They're stunning in flight. They concentrate and dance in these huge numbers, and they do wondrous things. 

(cranes squawking)

- The Crane Foundation is the center for the study of cranes, world wide. This is the only place in the world where you can find all 15 species of crane, in little ole Baraboo, Wisconsin.

- They've been around for millions of years, and just during the past couple of centuries they've taken a dive. We almost lost the whooping cranes; in 1940 there were only 15 birds left. And unless somebody did something internationally, many of those species would be lost.

- They were disappearing fast. It was a combination of hunting and habitat loss.

- 

[George]

 The whooping crane's are now up to 600 birds, and we've been part of that.

- I like to say that I that ICF is about cranes and about so much more than cranes. Ultimately it's really the work that we get engaged in through cranes that's what matters to people.

- They are symbols of longevity. They do live very very long lives. They are symbols of good parenting. They are symbols of marital fidelity; they stay together a very very very long time.

- They teach us survival because they have managed to survive. There's a reason they're here, There's a reason everything is here.

- When people say, "Well, what difference does it make "if there's any more cranes on this planet, so what?" So goes the cranes, so go our landscapes, so go our livelihoods. If the cranes are no longer there, we know that we've lost other things, and it's in our best interest to keep all of that intact.

(soothing piano music)

- Our mission is much more than just helping these fabulous birds survive. Huge expanses of wetlands and grasslands are needed to save these birds, so the cranes have become an ambassador for the whole environment. They're very much birds of good will. If the cranes are left on their own, without disturbance from humans, they do just fine as long as they have their habitat.

- If you help conserve the cranes, you're helping the entire ecosystem because if you preserve the crane's habitat, which would be wetlands, then you are preserving the habitat of any creature that live in wetlands.

- Wetlands are important for so many different species, and they're important for humans as well. Cranes need really pristine environments, and the fact that they are declining is in largely because their habitat is being destroyed, and so the measures that we can take to improve their habitat, having cranes come back to an area, symbolizes that, ya know, we're doing something right and it's gonna help all these other species. And it's gonna help us in the long run as well.

(rhythmic soothing music)

The status of cranes right now is, they might find themselves in dire circumstances because of people, and people are the solution to those dire problems. Cranes can live forever if people put their mind to it.- If nature just wanted to wipe out a species, then nature would do that. I just don't like the idea that we as human beings, who can save these species, are the ones that wiped them out. 

And so the money that comes in to ICF, and it all takes money, that money goes towards programs for crane conservation, crane wetlands. If we can get them to survive, then I also think it helps us as human beings to survive, because we need a lot of the same things that they do.- Nearly every place on earth that you find people, you also find cranes. Sadly, it's up to us to make sure that they persist on this earth too.- Okay.

This beautiful crane was found all over North America before the ice age; they're called the crown cranes. And actually the crane family evolved in North America. Their closest relative is the limpkin, that's only found in the Caribbean areas of the new world. They spread into Asia, crowned cranes, and eventually to Africa and as the earth cooled, because these crowned cranes can't take the cold water, they only survived in Africa. And that's where we have the two species today.

We had the evolution of the cold adaptant cranes, being located in Baraboo. The only cranes that we have to heat in the winter are the crowned cranes. The other cranes are very cold hearty.

Cranes live between 25 and 30 years if they make it through the first couple of years. We have about 40 percent mortality of birds that fledged during their first year. This is natural selection. When they're two years old, they start pairing. They can breed when they're three years old, and pairs are determined by a wonderful duet they do, called the unison call, in which the female voice is completely different from the male. 

Cranes have 18 different calls we can easily recognize, for various functions. "Where are you," is one. "I want you out of here," is another. "Let's get out of here," is a very short little burp that makes everybody fly. And, at Cornell University, where I did my doctorate, I studied the evolutionary relationships of cranes based on their voices and came up with an evolutionary tree which has been confirmed by DNA studies, subsequently. 

The red on the head, they can expand and contract, depending on their emotional state. The have elevated inner wing feathers, called tertials, which they can display with.

The tail is actually quite short, and a lot of cranes have very dark wing feathers, which adds strength to them. This is the North American Whooping Crane, which is our rarest crane. They like to dance. Young birds in particular engage in a great deal of courtship dancing. They also dance when they're nervous, a type of displacement behavior. And their threat displays are just amazing. 

They just transform themselves into these walking giants, they stand on their tip toes, the pull in their breasts, they fluff out their body, and they go through various contortions to indicate their emotional state to other birds. This is the unison call between a male and female white-naped crane, in this case the male has a different posture during the call than the female. And he gives one call for each two of the female, and this continues on for some seconds.

So, they're very territorial birds; during the breeding season they want to be by themselves to nest on a platform in the middle of a wetland or a grassland, and they drive other cranes away. And then they become extremely social after the chicks fledge and they gather in flocks. So, here one minute they're driving everybody away, and the next minute they're very social. 

So, this is one of the reasons they've evolved such magnificent displays to avoid hurting each other when they gather together. This is the world's tallest flying bird, that can fly, of course. This is the sarus crane from India, they can stand up to six feet tall, and this is part of their courtship display. They actually fly together doing these exaggerated postures.

They mate, the female is standing, the male mounts on her back, and they lay two eggs a year. Some of the cranes, like the crown cranes, will lay three eggs. And others like the wattled crane from Africa will only lay one egg, usually. Sandhill cranes are the most abundant of all the cranes; they number over 600,000 birds in North America and they pain their feathers with mud in the Spring. 

The actually will take pieces of grass or moss and dip it in mud and apply it to their feathers like a brush. And the feathers are all wet with this iron rich mud. It dries forming iron oxide, which chemically links with the feather pigment and cannot be washed out. The normal color of a sandhill crane is the upper neck, which they can't quite reach to paint. And they sit on their nest and are very very difficult to differentiate from a wet muskrat house.

Both male and female assist in the incubation that lasts about 30 days. The first chick hatches a couple of days before the second one. And the growth rate of these chicks is absolutely astounding. This sarus crane, which is the very very tall one and this little chick, this chick will be the size of mom and dad within four months.

And that rapid growth rate is supported by a high protein diet that they find in the wetlands. And throughout the day, the crane family is walking through the shallow water, not deep water. They don't like to swim. And in this narrow zone, they find the aquatic animal food. After the chicks fledge and the weather turns cold, cranes start flocking. Just yesterday I saw a flock of about 500 sandhill cranes in the cornfields between ICF and the Aldo Leopold reserve. 

So, this is one of the treats in central Wisconsin. In Asia, cranes are flocking now, too. And believe it or not, earlier this month, there was one of the great migrations in the world, as tens of thousands of cranes, demoiselle cranes, the smallest of cranes, scaled the Himalaya Mountains, and are photographed by mountain climbers on Mount Everest, way up above them. We don't know how they do it, where there's very very little oxygen, and they do this flight in one day. 

They gather in Tibet, building up their fat reserves and when the winds are right, they circle high on the the thermals and go straight over the Himalayas. If the weather turns bad, they sometimes come down in the valleys to rest in Nepal.

So, they cross continents, and they're very tied to the wetlands, and in the case of the whooping crane, to the blue crab. This animal food is very very important in supporting the growth of that very fast growing chick. When the chicks are young, they're this beautiful brown color, very similar to what the sandhill crane paints itself to become. 

And when hawks are flying over, the parents give a special call and the chick absolutely drops into the grass and remains absolutely motionless and it's very difficult for the raptor to detect. But these birds soon change their feathers. This is a young whooping crane. But they stay with mom and dad along the migration route, which is 2,700 miles from Wood Buffalo National Park to the Aransas National Wildlife Refuge on the coast of Texas. And throughout the winter they stay with mom and dad. 

In the case of the whooping crane, they're not socail in the winter, they defend about 500 acres of wetland, Brackish Water wetland in which there are a lot of blue crabs. The chicks beak does not complete growth until late winter, so it can't smash the blue crab to pieces like the adult cranes can. So, they will find the blue crabs, or it will, and it will bring it to the parents, the parents smash it up, and they eat the pieces.

Well, cranes are the most endangered family of birds in the world; eleven of the 15 species are endangered. And it's because of man. They are very very prone to flying into high tension wires, they can not breed if their wetlands are drained. They are very sensitive to disturbance and so on.

Okay, a bit about myself. I'm a Canadian. I was born and raised in Nova Scotia, Canada. And I had wonderful parents who lived in the country.

We had farm animals and they loved gardening, hunting, and so on. So I was brought up in that kind of environment, but I always had a great interest in birds. That was a little gift I had. And my parents were very accommodating, they let me have all kinds of domestic birds.

And I went to a one room school house, and in 1954, when I was eight years old, on Friday afternoon, we would have the Canadian Broadcast Team Corporation's program called, Science in the Air. It was a one half hour program. In 1954, the breeding ground of the whooping crane was finally discovered, in the wilderness of Wood Buffalo National Park. The Birds had migrated there from Texas. 

Nobody knew where they were, but they would appear again on the wintering grounds and sometimes seen in migration. That Spring a pilot surveying for forest fires looked down and saw large white birds on a marshland complex in Wood Buffalo National Park.

They whooping crane used to breed on the prairies. Southern Wisconsin, Illinois, northern Indiana, all through Iowa, up through Minnesota into Saskatchewan and Alberta. It was Alberta, the tall grass prairie. And during the 1800s when tens of thousands of pioneers came into this country to break the soil, to build their sod houses, they lived off the land, there were no stores. They came in the Spring, tried to get their potatoes planted to prepare for the winter. And a big bird, was a big meal. 

The trumpeter swans, the bison, the elk, they were all obliterated. But this one little group of whooping cranes found a place of sanctuary, way north of the tall grass prairie in Wood Buffalo National Park.

In this particular wetland complex, two rivers fan out over a huge basin, and there's no through stream. So you can't navigate into this wetland complex. The only way you can really get there is by air. And helicopters have been vital in our management programs to study these birds in subsequent years.

There's a whooping crane nest, very difficult to see in that vegetation, the birds are not on the nest; they've flown off. These are black spruce that border the wetlands. There are lots of diatoms in the water of each of the wetlands that's of a unique color. It's a really beautiful place. The birds arrive back in the Spring. Winter came so quickly, the bull rush did not have time to decay, they simply froze and dehydrated. 

And it's very easy to break those stems to build their large platform nest on which they lay their eggs and give their unison call to tell other whooping cranes to stay away. Well, that's a little bit about their story. They have to fly the gauntlet with all the power lines and hunters along the way in their migration route. And when they became rare, museums were the main problem for the birds, because they thought "This bird is soon going to be extinct. 

"Better to have a dead specimen in our drawer that we can study "than to leave it in the wild to die." The eggs were collected by museums. The birds were shot by museums. And this CBC program was a dramatization about a pair of whooping cranes that were flying from Texas to Wood Buffalo Park. It's a male and female in a drama, and they're describing all the problems they have in migration and the, "What a relief, we're finally in the wilderness, "and nobody knows where we are. 

Isn't this great? "Those museum people can't get in here. "They don't know where we are." Then you hear the airplane, and the female whooping crane is screaming, "They found us, they found us! "They're going to land and shoot us! "They're going to collect our eggs!" And here's this little kid, ya know, eight years old on the side of his chair, completely wrapped up in this story. And then the male whooping crane comes and says, "No dear, don't worry. "We're in Wood Buffalo National Park. 

"We are protected. "The wood bison have survived here, "and so will we." And so that brought some comfort. But from the age of eight, I was absolutely fascinated by everything I could read about cranes. They seemed like super birds to me. And the more I learned about them, the more addicted I became. An interest that led to my work at Cornell University, I assembled 56 cranes at the Laboratory for Ornithology, and started to study their behavior. 

At the same time, I wrote letters all over the world, asking for information about cranes and was dismayed. Most of the people reported, "Well, used to be here, "but they're gone and we don't know "if there are any left." Russia was locked behind the iron curtain, China behind the bamboo curtain back in the 1970's. But there were a scattering of birds in zoos and together, Ron Sauey and I, he was my colleague, he just started at Cornell as I was leaving in 1971. He was from Baraboo Wisconsin. 

I had a great interest in the work of Aldo Leopold and on my way to Japan to study cranes as a post Doc, I stopped in Baraboo as a guest of Ron and his family to see the Leopold shack, which I'd read so much about. And saw their beautiful farm that had recently been vacated by their Arabian horses; they moved them to Ocala, Florida. And the Saueys very graciously agreed to rent us their farm for a dollar a year, if we could establish this crane center and raise money to support it. 

This was too good to be true, so after my year overseas I came back, and in March of 1973, we co-founded the Crane Foundation and started bringing in the Cranes from all over the world. The Russians gave us eggs of the very rare Siberian Crane one hatched over Cleveland on it's 10,000 mile journey back to Baraboo. We look a little bit uptight about that. We brought in the only two red crowned cranes in the world, one from Honolulu, one from Boston. 

They fell in love and we raised red crowned cranes, and now all of the endangered species of cranes are very well established in captivity.

We moved from the Sauey farm in 1983. We expanded our board. We were able to buy this beautiful 200 acre site along Shady Lane Road, very near the Leopold Reserve. It includes three parts: Crane City with 61 crane-dominiums, 110 acres of restored prairie just to the, above Crane City there. And then a public area where you can come and see all 15 species of cranes.

I'm best known for my dance with the whooping crane. And I tell you this story because it describes another type of learning in cranes. We know the young cranes spend a lot of time with their parents, but unfortunately this bird hatched at San Antonio Zoo in 1966, when there were only about 56 whooping cranes in the world, and this was the only offspring of that pair of cranes, and the zoo director, fearing that it might die, took it into his home and actually raised this bird by hand. 

It had no contact with whooping cranes, and became hopelessly imprinted on humans. After 10 years of trying to breed this bird at a government center in Maryland called the Potuxent Wildlife Research Center of Fish and Wildlife, I proposed they send it to Baraboo. We were just a new organization, and I agreed to work with this bird in the Spring to see if we could artificailly inseminate it and get fertile eggs.

So, she arrived in the summer of 1977. I moved my office down into her subdivided pen, and she became very very attached to me. This is the first time anyone spent extended period of time with her. And she'd never laid an egg They usually lay when they're three years old. She's now 10. Early in the Spring, I moved back from the 1st of April to work with Tex. We put a young siberian crane in a pen next to her to sort of simulate the family scene, male, female, chick. 

She sort of ignored the chick, because she really didn't like cranes.

But she wanted to get out of that pen, so I thought I'll let her out and see where she goes. And she walked up to the top of the hill, and that's where she wanted to stay. So, I built this little shack in which I could have my typewriter, my radio, and I'd get there and bring her up from her secure pen down the hill, at the crack of dawn and I would spend until dusk with her for about seven weeks every spring.

It was quite an ordeal. I was working in China during those winters, and, of course, had a lot of administrative work with the Crane Foundation, so that was my office. And she was so happy, she was content; she wasn't pacing the fence. And she would come up to the door, and she would give a little call, which means I want to dance with you. So that was my exercise for the day, there was a bucket of water there and some pelleted food in the green bucket. And that was life on the hill. 

And twice a week we would import semen that was freshly collected in the morning from a whooping crane at Patuxent because we only had one whooping crane. And it was transported from the Baltimore, Washington airport all the way to Madison. We'd go down and pick it up; it's in this little vile. You couldn't put it in a test tube, it had to breathe, it had to get oxygen into those sperm, it had to be hand held. 

The people at North Central Airlines were absolutely wonderful, they thought this was a real kick. And you had to keep it perfectly horizontal, if it went up the side, it would dry out. And so, we have... Tex and I are out there in the morning, and I refused to dance with her. And she was quite frustrated by that, because I wanted to save the dance for the insemination.

So, by mid afternoon, the researchers would invade our territory, she's very angry at them because she was so upset that these humans, my own species, are invading our territory. She's displaying the red on the top of her head towards Rich and Sue. And they would run around the house and she would chase them, and they would dive into my house and close the door. And in her mind, she'd driven them out of her world. And so then I would dance with her, and she was really hot to trot by that point. 

And she would put her wings out to be mated, and I would stoke her back, and they would run out and shoot her up. 

(laughter)

And that happened twice a week. 

(laughter)

 It was, ya know, our big event during the week.

Well, when I would stroke her back a couple of times a day to simulate the copulation thing, I could feel her abdomen, and you can tell like, two days before they lay an egg, you can feel the egg in there.

And one afternoon, I could feel the first egg. And we'd build a little nest, and she was very very interested in this whole thing. And I would sit out there with her to give her sort of the comfort, and male cranes stay very very close to the female when they're laying the eggs, they feel very vulnerable at that time. And every year she would lay one egg. But every year something would happen to the egg. 

The first year, it wasn't fertile, the next year it was fertile but it died while hatching; it had a deformed head, and on and on. And finally in 1982 we hatched a chick, and it became a beautiful male whooping crane which is still alive at the Crane Foundation today, and has fathered so many birds for reintroduction into the wild. Well, this is the male and female whooping crane, I mean a sandhill crane and a whooping crane, showing you the size difference.

As we started the Crane Foundation, in 1976 through 1988, an experiment was done in Idaho, not associated with us, because we only had Tex, and of course, we only produced one chick from Tex. But the Fish and Wildlife Service and the Canadian Wildlife Service cooperated in starting an experiment by putting whooping crane eggs into the nests of sandhill cranes, in a place called Grey's Lake National Wildlife Refuge in Idaho. 

The sandhill cranes from that Rocky Mountain area migrated down into Colorado, to Monta Vista, and then down the San Louis valley to the Rio Grande valley south of Albuquerque at a place called Bosque Del Apache National Wildlife Refuge. It was a 670 mile migration route. 

The experiment was to determine if a new population of whooping cranes could be established that bred in this wonderful wetland called Grey's Lake National Wildlife Refuge, by substituting the eggs of whooping cranes into the nest of the ubiquitous sandhill cranes. Eggs were brought from Wood Buffalo National Park,

and from the Patuxent Wildlife Research Center where they did have the first captive population of whoopers, which was established by a gang bringing in eggs from the wild. The cranes laid two eggs in the wild, but they usually only raised one chick. So if you go in by helicopter towards the end of the incubation period and collect one egg, the normal productivity is undisturbed, and in the process you establish a captive flock. 

So, the whooping crane egg was placed in the sandhill crane nest, the sandhill crane eggs were removed. And 77 whooping cranes were raised and fledged, and migrated with sandhill cranes to Bosque Del Apache, spent the winter, moved into a completely upland habitat. No blue crabs there, they're feeding in cornfields, which showed that the whooping cranes had much greater plasticity than we'd thought. 

The returned to Grey's Lake, they developed a whole new migration route but unfortunately they did not like whooping cranes, they liked sandhill cranes. And they courted the sandhill cranes, they ignored each other, and eventually they all died off because the experiment had been discontinued just as Tex was fixated on people, these whooping cranes were on sandhill cranes.

Well, let's go back to the Crane Foundation. We're growing up, it's now the late 1980's, we've built Crane City and the U.S. government has decided, "These people know what they're doing. "We're going to split the large flock of whooping cranes "at Patuxent." There were about 50 birds, "And we're going to send half of them "to Baraboo, Wisconsin." So, these birds arrived in 1989, and since then, we have had a major role in whooping crane reintroduction. 

As I said, the cranes are cold hearty, our whooping cranes have these large pens under nets, we can keep them full winged so they can mate properly. If they can't mate for various reasons, we put Christmas trees in one corner and we can run the male into the trees and collect the semen.

They nest in these pens, that bird's sitting on eggs.

We put wetlands in the pen. And they engage in their courtship and where as in the wild they only lay two eggs a year, in captivity we can get maybe seven or eight eggs from a pair of cranes if we're lucky. So, early learning is extremely important. The first thing this little crane sees when it hatches is this enormous white thing above it, standing on stilts, and then this head comes down with the red an the white markings, making this 

(tongue trill)

 call and passing them a little insect to eat or something. And this is when the critical imprinting period happens, particularly when the cranes are very very young.

So, what we did, thanks to the work of Dr. Robert Neil Horowitz... He did research with sandhill cranes, raising them with puppets and costume people. I thought this was ridiculous, I thought cranes aren't that dumb, but guess what. 

(laughter)

 And now we are raising whooping cranes and South Africans are raising wattled cranes and Russians are raising siberian cranes with appropriate costumes. Just as the whooping cranes stay with their mom and dad, the birds reared by costumed people want to remain with them for up to nine or ten months. And even when these birds are much older and in the wild, we can use the costume to get, to recruit birds to get of the migration and become lost. 

One little female from Wisconsin ended up way out in eastern Ohio. And the costume appeared over the hill, she flew to the costume, landed right beside it, and was soon in a plywood crate, headed back for Necedah National Wildlife Refuge. We're very grateful to the collaboration with Operation Migration, a non-profit organization out of Port Perry, Ontario. They come down to Wisconsin every year to raise a group of whooping cranes. 

The pilot in this case, is wearing the crane costume and they're now flying mamma who is on wings.

The left passage, shows the migration route of the old flock of whooping cranes. They've now increased to 310 birds, from 15 in 1940. The new flock is this red line that goes to Florida. And we now have 92 birds in the new flock of whooping cranes. We have a third flock in Louisiana, a non migratory flock and we have about 40 birds in that. So, this remarkable recovery of the whooping crane from 1940 to this year, has been a very gradual thing, but we now face huge pressures in Texas. 

Because of climate change, the ocean is becoming higher, the marshes are being inundated and will soon be too deep for the whooping cranes, so we're scrambling to buy more inland areas, which eventually will become wetlands, but there is so much development in Texas it's all about land. So, that flock is not out of the woods at all. Climate change is having a huge effect and the increase in the human population in that region of Texas. 

That's why the new flock in Wisconsin and the new flock in Louisiana are very very important. Okay, let's come back to our site, We've talked about Crane City, now we'll talk about the restored habitats and the visitor program at ICF. These are our gates, they close at the end of October, and they open in early April. And we have visitors from the 1st of April to the end of October. We have about 25,000 visitors a year,

and you may encounter strange cranes, like this. We do a lot of creative programs with kids of all ages at the Crane Foundation. I think we have about 9,000 kids come as school groups, mainly in June, late May, and in September and October, of course, when school is open. We make use of some cranes that are sort of, have the same problem that Tex had. They like people and they come up and they're extremely good birds for environmental education, because they're not afraid. 

This is a crowned crane. We try to provide natural habitats for the cranes, and you can observe them building their nests and breeding. We don't plant lawns, that's virgin prairie on a little hillside surrounding a glacial kettle, which is very deep with the wetland and wild sandhill cranes are breeding just over that hill. The lupines are blooming as I took that picture.

We are accessible to people that have problems with walking, and we have special machines that they can drive around and see the cranes of the world at close range.

We have four miles of nature trails and special walks to learn about the natural habitats of Wisconsin, including 114 acres of restored prairie.

And this restored land is extremely important for our foreign colleagues because a lot of our work in Africa and Asia is on restoration of areas that have been destroyed. And the methods we use in studying the soils and the original vegetation here in Wisconsin are very very important teaching tools.

Our best exhibit is called the whooping crane exhibit from a sunken amphitheater, you look right into a wetland with deep water around the amphitheater so they can't swim in. And you can see the whooping crane is on her nest back there, and have your picture taken in a rather natural looking setting.

And I'm just gonna go back... This is at the dance of the whooping crane, you'll enjoy this.

(chorus music)

 The music in the background, is from an Evening With Cranes. We had a little band that comes and plays music. It's... The Evening With Cranes happens one evening in late June, when we serve food and wine, and our foreign colleagues are there to tell about what they're doing. And the whooping cranes sort of got into the swing of things that evening. You'll notice the female's wings are sort of bald, she's moulting. 

Whooping cranes lose all of their flight feathers every second year, but it doesn't affect their dancing.

The male in this case, he's on the left, you see his wings are full, but the female's are not.

Okay, we've had enough of you guys.

And sometimes, actually we have whooping crane chicks hatch and you can observe the whole family story, right from the whooping crane exhibit.

We make use of murals, this is to indicate what the Baraboo hills may have looked like 200 years ago with the passenger pigeons the whooping cranes, trumpeter swans, and so on. And we've all kinds of creative programs for children.

 This is Cully Shelton who heads our visitor program, an absolutely remarkable young man.

We also bring our members to see cranes in the wild. I do two trips a year, one to Bhutan and one to Mongolia, two of the most beautiful areas on earth. And we have a very special trip coming up in April of 2016 to a fabulously beautiful area of the world.

It's being led by Dr. Rich Beilfuss, who is our CEO who started as an intern at the Crane Foundation back in 1986. We're working on the grey-crowned cranes in that part of the world. They've undergone an 80 percent population decline in the last 20 years because of their beauty. They're being captured as pre-fledglings and sold to animal dealers to decorate the estates of the wealthy in various parts of the world. 

One safari park in China bought 500 grey-crowned cranes on the illegal market of course, and for every crane that makes it to a center about nine die in the wild. So, one in ten make it. So, this area of Eastern Africa, Kenya, Uganda, and Rwanda are key sites for our work. So the two countries on this trip that we'll be visiting are Uganda and Rwanda, on the west side of Lake Victoria. This is really the stronghold for this beautiful grey-crowned crane. 

And we have a long and complicated program associated with this conservation that I don't have time to go into today, but you'll find all out about it. This is the flag of Uganda, which has the crowned crane on it. Part of the tour is to go to Queen Elizabeth National Park and see the megafauna. And then into Rwanda to see a different megafauna, not only the crowned cranes, but up in these mountains, the mountain gorillas.

We'll have several tours up with the gorillas. Our full time employee in Rwanda is a veterinarian. And he worked with injured gorillas caught in snares, for many years and is now working with the Crane Foundation.

So, another type of imprinting is going on here, another type of learning. So, what does it all mean? It means that the early environment of humans and cranes are very very important, which you all know so well, and thank you for all the work that you are doing to educate our young people. But we have a lot to learn from the rest of the world. Our ancestors came in to North America, and they ransacked it. There was no idea about environmentalism, you were struggling to survive. 

In china, they have eight species of cranes. A civilization that goes back 8,000 years, and they haven't lost a single species of crane because the crane is a sacred bird to the Chinese. It would be an absolute taboo to think of hurting a crane. And within China, is the Tibetan Plateau. And the Tibetans consider the black neck crane, the most spiritual of all animals. And the cranes are absolutely tame. They spend the winter walking around the farm yards and the rice fields in Tibet. 

And when they migrate, they circle up in the thermals and go to higher altitude wetlands where they breed. And the local people in Tibet will not plant their crops until the cranes do these circling flights and depart, because they believe that the cranes are blessing their fields. So, they dress up the yaks, they make a little shrine, and they do the first plowing of their fields, after the cranes leave.

We've been working in Tibet since 1990, and I had conversations with these people, and I said, well why are the cranes so special to you? What's the difference? And they said, "Well the cranes are spiritual birds."

And what's so spiritual about them, I say. "Well, they're spiritual." 

(laughter)

 So, I guess the appeal of cranes goes beyond words.

And Aldo Leopold put it most beautifully in his Sand County Almanac. And this is what really touched me when I was a student at Cornell. From the humble shack where he experienced habitat restoration and conservation, he wrote the beautiful Marshland Elegy, the most beautiful thing I think that's ever been written about cranes. And he said, "He is the symbol of our untamable past "of that incredible sweep of millenia which underlies "the daily conditions of birds and of men. 

"When we hear his voice we hear no mere bird. "He's the trumpet in the orchestra of evolution. "The silence discernible in some wetlands, "stems from their once heaving harbored cranes "now they stand...

"...silent, adrift in history."

It was through my interest in Leopold and Wisconsin that I by chance met Ron Sauey just as I was leaving Cornell University. So, I always say that Leopold introduced us.

And the first year at ICF, in 1973, Mrs Leopold--

Dr. Leopold died in 1948, but in 1973, his widow was still alive. She came out three times that summer to see the few cranes that we had. And she was so enthusiastic about it, and every time she returned to Madison, she would say, "My husband would be all for this." And that was without a doubt, the best endorsement I could ever have. Another beautiful line from Leopold is, "Nothing so important as an ethic is ever written." It evolves in the mind of a thinking community.

 The Tibetans have been thinking about cranes for a long long time. And we in North America have been thinking about them since we almost lost the whooping crane, and our mission is to spread those values worldwide. Thank you very much, it's a great pleasure to be here, and I hope that you can sign up for a free membership in the Crane Foundation, the sheet is right up here. We'll give you a one year membership. And if you're interested in going to Rwanda, and Uganda, let me know. Thank you. 
(applause)