- 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 world wide.
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)