- Welcome, everyone, to Wednesday Nite @ the Lab. I'm Tom Zinnen. I work here at the UW-Madison Biotechnology Center. I also work for UW-Extension Cooperative Extension, and on behalf of those folks and our other co-organizers, Wisconsin Public Television, the Wisconsin Alumni Association, and the UW-Madison Science Alliance, thanks again for coming to Wednesday Nite @ the Lab. We do this every Wednesday night, 50 times a year. Tonight, it's my great pleasure to introduce to you Rich Beilfuss. He's the CEO of the International Crane Foundation up in Baraboo. He was born in Chicago, Illinois.  But he can't help that.   (laughter)   He went to high school at La Grange High School, then went to Northwestern University and got an undergraduate degree in economics. Then he came here to UW-Madison and got two master's degrees, one in civil engineering and one in water resources management from the Nelson Institute. Then he got his PhD here at UW Madison at the Nelson Institute. He started working with the International Crane Foundation as a graduate student in 1988. He became their CEO in 2010. As I mentioned in my little missive, I never saw sandhill cranes when I was a kid, and it's amazing to me when you see them fly over the countryside and roads of Wisconsin now, because I always think, what's the blue heron doing stretching its neck out?   (laughter)   Oh, it's not, it's craning its neck out and therefore it's a crane. I think it's a wonderful story that we get to hear tonight on cranes as ambassadors of conservation for all over the world. Please join me in welcoming Rich to Wednesday Nite @ the Lab.  - Thanks.   (applause)   Great. Good evening, everyone. Can you hear me okay here? Yeah. Good. Before I start my talk, I want to shout out two of the many celebrities in the audience here right now, but I want to acknowledge Ginny Wolfe, who is a very long-serving member of our board of directors, great to see Ginny, and Tran Triet, who I didn't know was coming and I'm going to talk about him in a little bit, but Tran Triet has led our work in Vietnam for close to 20 years and is just a stellar conservationist. It's great to see you here, Triet. You're going to see a picture of yourself later.   (laughter)   So it's great to be here. As Tom said, I've been with the International Crane Foundation for a long time. And part of the story I'll tell you tonight will maybe explain why I've stuck around so long and why I have this weird background of economics and engineering and water and a bit of biology and why all of that relates to crane conservation. That's one of the stories, take-home messages I hope comes clear tonight. We are a very diverse bunch at the Crane Foundation because our work very much kind of embodies the conservation challenges we face all over the world. And I'll tell you some stories from different places we are around the world, but I kind of want to start more fundamentally with this, who are these weird crane people up in Baraboo? Why do we exist, and what are we doing? So, I'll sort of start you off with that. I think many of you have been up to Baraboo to the Crane Foundation. I don't know if I can do show of hands on TV. Quite a few. Great. Well, we're delighted to have you up here. Many people know us from Baraboo but I think a much smaller percentage of the people who sort of know us here in Wisconsin really know us in this role, which is a global conservation organization. We are very active in more than 50 countries. We work with a network of more than a thousand people. We have major regional programs in Asia, Africa, as well as here in North America. And that's a big part of the story I'd like to share with you tonight. So, why cranes? We sort of talk about what is it about cranes? What's the quality of cranes that just works for conservation? First of all, I think they're stunningly beautiful. Many of the different crane species are stunningly beautiful. They're also very conspicuous, often with long, white necks. They stand out. They're huge birds. Birders love them because they're not little tiny LBJs. You can actually see them and identify them.   (laughter)   They do these exquisite dances. If you've ever been up at the Crane Foundation and see the birds dance in unison call together, you know that, or if you've seen them out in the wild, it's very engrossing to see these beautiful dancing, mating rituals. They're very good parents. They actually raise a precocial chick. They're very good at tending to that chick, and they do a lot of parental care. Most cranes raise one or two chicks. That is a big part of their problem of why we struggle to keep them in the wild. Some raise up to three but that's about it. So they're good parents. They do fantastic migrations. They fly over beautiful landscapes. Many of the cranes have long, long migrations. These are black-necked cranes flying over Bhutan. They also fly over Tibet. So they're beautiful in flight. And they form tremendous congregations. These are the Eurasian cranes, and this is in the Hula Valley of Israel, actually not up in the north, not that far from Syria, up that way. And they form incredible concentrations, and some of you may know their concentrations or congregations in the fall here in Wisconsin and on the Platte River in Nebraska and so on.  And they select a nest and live in beautiful places. They take us to many beautiful places around the world. It's a great perk of working for the Crane Foundation. I get to go to a lot of beautiful places and work to try to save them. And because of all that, I think, their beauty and elegance and calls and striking, striking viewing in the wild and all, they've been a part of our culture for a very, very long time. This is from Utah. This is a Native American paintings. In Australia, you can find Aboriginal paintings dating back tens of thousands of years with cranes. They've been part of our culture for a very long time. Cranes are often on the wedding kimonos in Japan. You see them all throughout East Asia, and they're actually mentioned in the bible, in the fundamental Hindu texts, including the Ramayana, and the Buddha story of suffering, how Buddha discovered suffering in the ancient Buddhist texts is actually over the shooting of a crane. It's often falsely identified as the swans, but there were actually not swans in the area where Buddha lived at the time. So it was actually the shooting, probably of a sarus crane, which Triet right here does a lot of work. So really deep cultural connections. And because of that, cranes are embedded in culture all over the world. The national, the center of the national flag of Uganda is a grey crowned crane, and the national soccer team is called the Cranes. I love that. We're always rooting for them. They're on money in many, many different countries, in Japan. The five-cent coin in South Africa is called a blue for the blue crane. They, this is the National Bank in Uganda, the Crane Access Bank. They are embedded culture throughout. And yet there's a paradox with that because, on the one hand, they're loved, really and culturally throughout the world, and yet they're among the most endangered family of birds in the world, so how can that be? To be so loved and so endangered? The data kind of speak to themselves about the status of the family. There's 15 species of cranes around the world. 11 of them are officially classified as some level of endangered, either critically endangered, endangered or vulnerable to extinction. Those are all different categories of threat. Only four of the 11 species of cranes are officially not threatened. And three of those species actually have major populations or subspecies that are threatened or endangered. So none of them are just in the clear, even our sandhills that are becoming so abundant right here. I'll tell the whooping crane story a little better, a little bit later, sorry, but there's about 500, probably a few less, in the wild. They hit a low of about 15 in the world. And there's other cranes that are in really dramatic decline around the world. So they're loved and they're very, very threatened. I think that there are three ideas that explain this sort of paradox and also why cranes are great focal point or ambassadors for conservation as we like to call them. I think the first key idea is cranes are really very sensitive indicators of environmental health. For a big bird, and they are very big birds-- Cranes include the tallest flying bird on Earth, the sarus crane. They actually have a very sensitive relationship to the environment, and in many cases have very strong responses to changes in water and land. For example, these little dots here are black-neck cranes up in the Tibetan plateau. And they nest in areas up there that are fed by glacial melt runoff from the Himalayas. And so they're very sensitive to changes in runoff in that area. They're a species we're watching very closely in terms of climate change and change in local conditions. Very much triggered to the availability of water in those high altitude regions. Whooping cranes, and I'll tell the whooping crane story a little bit later, another bird very sensitive to water and land-use changes along the coast, including a very tight relationship to the blue crab, which is about 90% of its diet. I'll talk through that story a little bit later, but blue crabs are on  And fundamentally, too, as we find in many places, crane conservation can be about people and human livelihoods in many places. And there are real win/win scenarios. We work to be the opposite of the classic, for example the spotted owls battles of the 1990s, where it was all about birds or jobs. You know, people or wildlife. We completely reject these kind of black and white scenarios because we're looking and a lot of conservation today is looking to find those, the win/win solutions where you can find a place for birds within society, within landscapes that feels a lot more sustainable than when we're pitted against each other. So, a lot of times when we're working for people, we actually find ourselves working for livelihoods.  So I'm going to draw out four stories. I will tell you one from Asia, one from Africa, and then one from here at home kind of spanning North America for four of the 15 species of cranes of the world. I'll start with the sarus crane. So I'm delighted to have Triet here. But don't correct me if I get anything wrong here. I'll start with this story. This is one of my favorite stories, and I did my master's work here at the university back in the '80s and Vietnam. So this is really where I did the first significant fieldwork myself, and then eventually we passed this work over to the much more confident hands of Triet and others who really took this work and ran with it for 20 more years as our staff and our program leaders. But Vietnam, working in the Mekong Delta of Vietnam, this is the Mekong River in this map, and the Mekong is one of the famous rivers of the world. I believe it's the ninth biggest river of the world. It's well known. It's known for many things, especially its exotic fish, including, in the upper right-hand corner, my favorite, the giant dog-eating catfish. Few things more exotic than a giant dog-eating catfish. But they have a lot of amazing fish, some of the best fisheries in the world on the Mekong. But it's also the home to one of the rarest cranes of the world: the sarus crane. It is the tallest flying bird on Earth. You can see a nice pair of them up in the Crane Foundation if you come and visit us. They stand about six feet tall. They're enormous birds. And this was a great conservation story. We got involved in Vietnam in mid-1980s because of a report that sarus cranes had appeared in the Mekong Delta. And at that time, they hadn't been seen throughout the war period. Actually, dating back to before the period of French involvement, they hadn't been seen in the Vietnam part of the delta. And a big reason for that is much of the delta was aggressively drained during the war as part of the war effort. And following the war, the Vietnamese were very industrious in settling a lot of the delta and became one of the most densely populated rural and very aquatic areas of the world, with people living on dikes throughout that system. So when we got involved, the wetlands of the Mekong Delta were disappearing very, very fast. A lot of the birds were disappearing very fast. And then we had this discovery, and the discovery was by this man right here who was a colonel for the North Vietnamese who had survived during the war in the wetlands of then South Vietnam, living off the resources of South Vietnam, including these big wetlands. And he recognized the value of these wetlands and wanted to set them aside for their timber and other products before the whole of the delta was converted over to development and rice. And he fought very hard and is a real conservation hero for this area right here called Trom Chin, which is about a 20,000 hectare or so wetland in the heart of the Mekong Delta, the biggest remaining wetland in that area. And we got very involved in trying to support that effort in the late 1980s to build water gates to manage waters in that system and try to create a home for a small population of these eastern sarus cranes that have returned. But the big story came after that. As much as we worked for Trom Chin, there were relatively few birds there and other areas more critical for their survival. And a particularly important place was Phu My, on the border with Cambodia, and that's where the star of the story, Tran Triet, and others got involved to really demonstrate real meaningful conservation solutions. The work at Phu My really centered on a challenge that was put forth by local government there, which was that they said we're going to convert this wetland into an agricultural area unless you can come up with an alternative land use that's more beneficial than converting it to agriculture. That was essentially the challenge. It was slated for development and to be converted like much of the delta had been converted to rice agriculture. Now, there was a wonderful tradition in that are