- 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, Wisconsin Public Radio, the Wisconsin Alumni Association, and the UW-Madison Science Alliance, thanks again for coming to Wednesday Nite @ the Lab. We do this every Thursday night.  - Wednesday night.  - I've never done that before. We do that every Wednesday night, 50 times a year.   (laughter)   Tonight it's my pleasure to introduce to you Barry Hartup. He's with the Department of Surgical Sciences here in the School of Veterinary Medicine, and he's also with the International Crane Foundation. He was born in Iowa City in the great state of... Iowa. And he went to high school in Roseville, Minnesota, and then he came to the University of Wisconsin-Madison to get an undergraduate degree in zoology. And he got his master's degree in the Nelson Institute, and then he got his Doctor of Veterinary Medicine here at UW-Madison. After a few years of practice, he went to Cornell to get a PhD, and then, in the year 2000, he started in at the Crane Foundation up near Baraboo. Tonight he's going to talk with us about the health of cranes, avian medicine, and conservation. Please join me in welcoming Barry Hartup to Wednesday Nite @ the Lab.   (applause)    - Thank you. Thank you very much. It's a pleasure to be here speaking to you all tonight. The story, I guess, that I'm sort of weaving in throughout this presentation is one that took about 35 years or so to manifest. It sort of tells the journey of how the School of Veterinary Medicine and some of its staff have helped the world of avian conservation by sort of practicing veterinary medicine sort of outside the usual bounds and considering a species, working with a species, that not everybody gets to work with very often. And what's very interesting about my situation right now with this sort of dual appointment, yes, I have standing here at the university, but I'm also the Director of Conservation Medicine at the International Crane Foundation, and I was thinking today, one of these days I'm going to have to get a custom-made hat that has both logos, and whenever I need the logo of choice, I can spin it forward. This really is sort of a collaboration between the university and one of our favorite non-governmental, nonprofit organizations in south central Wisconsin, the International Crane Foundation. And what I do is essentially I am the doc for a unique sort of living museum of the world's 15 species of cranes in Baraboo. ICF is an organization that has been in existence since 1973. They're the only organization that I'm aware of in the world that exhibits all 15 of the species of cranes that are extant currently. What has always made this place so unique is the fact that it is so mission-driven on one taxa. And the reason is, is because cranes are one of the most endangered families of birds in the world. Of the 15, 11 are threatened or endangered with extinction. And so since its founding, ICF has always had, made use of resources in the wildlife health or avian health world. Here at the university, actually a precursor, I guess, or one consultant was, do any of you know Bernie Wentworth? Formally of the Department of Poultry Science? Bernie was an avian physiologist and a big helper to ICF in its early days. As well as the USGS National Wildlife Health Research Center, or the Health Center, which is on the south side of the Beltline, has been involved with ICF for some time. But, really, sort of the clinical approach or the application of veterinary medicine to the health of cranes really began with the veterinary school's founding in 1983. So we are at that 35-year mark. And, actually, in the upper left of this picture is someone who I met in the summer of 1986 when I was doing my internship with the ICF after my zoology degree. It was a veterinarian by the name of Paul Howard. And he was one of the original clinical faculty at the school. And he was helping this kind of wacko project with sandhill cranes being done up at the Necedah National Wildlife Refuge northwest of here where they were rearing these sandhill cranes with people wearing costumes so that the cranes didn't imprint on the people. And using that as a first run as an approach to take captured reared animals and successfully reintroduce them in the wild. So here he is doing a health check on the birds  It's not going to coincide with being able to migrate. So that bird was allowed back into his social group, which will help his demeanor and his behavior management as that bird heals. But if you want to go visit this bird, you can see Torch at the Milwaukee County Zoo and their whooping crane exhibit. He did just fine but he was sort of remanded to captivity because we don't have a way to bring isolation-reared birds into captivity and re-release them. A very large part of what I do is focused on what we call reintroduction medicine. So we have sort of what I call the zoological practice for the captive flock and the birds that are productive, that are meeting population management goals, whether for captivity or for released in the wild with regards to whooping cranes. But then I have a very large slice that is focused on the medical management, the health management of the chicks that we are actually putting out to speed the recovery of the endangered whooping crane. I mentioned that old study that was done in the mid-1980s to work out a technique to prevent improper imprinting by cranes on people. And so you can see the handler of this young whooping crane chick is wearing a costume to hide the human form beneath it because we do need to manage the health of these birds as they grow, pretty intensely, because they have a lot of problems. And so we have a well-- just like you would have a well child visit with your doctor for many years, for the first two months of life we have the same kind of schedule for these very fast-growing chicks. They get to adult size within about two to three months. And so a lot is going on there and a lot can go wrong very quickly. And one very kind of interesting issue we had to deal with this last year was a sudden change in the timing of the work that we do to rear these birds. Normally ICF is called upon amongst all of the institutions in North America that participate in crane rearing for introduction, there are three of them, one in Calgary and one outside of DC. We were asked, instead of, to rear chicks, instead of in June, in May. Well, if you know anything about the weather in Wisconsin in May, it's exceedingly variable and much different than a typical June. And what happened is we had a rash, by July, we had a rash of rib fractures, broken ribs in our group of chicks. In fact, we had seven birds with one or more broken ribs. Bird ribs are very, are normally quite strong structures, very rigid. But in a growing chick, they're fairly flexible. And because of how we handled the birds, we sort of nestled them in our hands and hold their legs so they don't scratch themselves, they can get a little top heavy. Maybe that puts a little bit of pressure on the chest, but we didn't think it was a handling issue. And what happened is that, due to that early rearing, we think that they may have had some problems with bone strength. One because of vitamin D, lowered vitamin D levels. We compared the 2017 chicks to a very good year that we had blood samples archived in our freezers and showed that this past year's chicks had slightly lower vitamin D levels at one month of age but that those corrected quite nicely by two to three months of age. And then also the thyroid that helps regulate calcium in the bloodstream. The parathyroid hormone was elevated. In other words, the body is sort of crying out for a little bit more calcium into the system. And then we took a very deep look at the birds' diet that they were given in those first couple weeks. For a number of reasons, we had to use a diet that was slightly different than the zoo diet that we normally would use. Yes, it's Agrimaster poultry feed from Blain's Farm & Fleet.   (laughter)   And it didn't meet, lo and behold, junky food didn't meet what they said on the label. For its calcium phosphorus ratio, which should have been more like about 1.6, when we tested it, it was very low. It was about 1.1. And the problem is that's not particularly good for bone health and growth and development. You can see the crane diet that we normally h  It also is not surprising perhaps that it is focused on North America. It's kind of been our backyard as an extension of the work that we do with the captive whooping cranes. And that is working with the wild population of the whooping crane. So here we have this reintroduced population that we started here with in Wisconsin in 2001. But that is an extra experimental population. Really what you need, what I'd like you to focus on is this population that we refer to as the Aransas Wood Buffalo population. This is the remnant wild migratory population that survived this genetic bottleneck in 1940 when there were only 15 of the entire species remaining. They were all in this population, and they're the population from which the captive flocks of ICF and sister organizations and all these reintroduced birds have sprung from. In fact, we think there were only about four to six matrilineal lines that actually survived the bottleneck. But the population winters at Aransas National Wildlife Refuge, an hour north of Corpus Christi. We'll talk maybe a little bit later about Hurricane Harvey and what it may or may not have done to that refuge. But this species breeds, this wasn't known until the early 1950s, actually, where these birds went to, to breed in summer. And these were found by, I believe, foresters or firefighting outfits in Canada. And this was within the bounds of Wood Buffalo National Park, which straddles the boundary between Alberta and Northwest Territories at the 60th parallel. It's about a 2500-mile migration. And this population has really recovered remarkably. Their current number stands. I think Tom used a number in one of his advertisements pieces, the entire species numbers, I want to say, somewhere between 650 and maybe 700 birds. But I want you to focus on that remnant wild population has gone from 15 in 1940 to between 350 and 400 birds today, as best we know. It's a pretty remarkable recovery. It's gone through a fairly robust, about 4% a year, growth rate. They're beautiful birds to see on the landscape. It's North America's tallest flying bird. Impressive wingspan. These birds stand about five-and-a-half feet tall but remarkably don't weigh a whole lot. They're about five to six kilograms, maybe 12 to 14 pounds. And our work has really focused on a willingness by the Canadian Wildlife Service and the US Fish and Wildlife Service to now dive a little bit deeper into where these birds are on the landscape, what type of habitats do they use, and learn more sort of fine scale spatial information about their migration routes and their local use of breeding and wintering habitat. So beginning in 2009 we had our first phase of marking of this species for the first time in probably about 20 years. And we focused on these remnant sort of concentrations of the population in a couple of different watersheds in the north part of Wood Buffalo National Park. So this black line is the north central sort of border of Wood Buffalo National Park. Here's the NWT/Alberta border. Fort Smith, Northwest Territories, is located about right there, where my pointer is. And that's where we fly out from. And so what we're making use of are helicopter surveys and nesting surveys that the Canadian Wildlife Service does every May to understand what the number and distribution is of the whooping crane nesting effort. They count how many birds are sitting still on a nest, and it's pretty easy to see a white dot on a very non-white landscape. And then we know if we come back to that site in two months, about 40% to 50% of the time we might find a chick with those parents. But that territory has to be reached by air and, especially if we're going to get on the ground, by helicopter because it's essentially an inaccessible wilderness. And so we stage out of Fort Smith, the small airport there, fly over the great Slave River, and get to the whooping crane nesting grounds, and that's probably the best shot I can give you from this last year, which is just this amazing sort of boreal forest wetland system with these large networks of po  - He's in the trees, right there.  - What we're doing is we're keying in on the helicopter. There you see what looks like a fly in the upper part of the video there. The helicopter positions itself back behind the family group and gives us something to site in on because we're not going to see the birds on the ground.  And their natural inclination is once the parents see us, the parents will alarm call and flush, and then the baby will hunker down and just hide under the trees or any available vegetation. And so we have 12 minutes because we don't-- There's no real pursuit in this capture. We want to get our hands on, but we don't want to disturb them for any longer than we have to, so we have 12 minutes to get to the chick. And then once we have our hands on the chick, our goal is about 15 to 20 minutes of working time to get our jobs done. So here we're weighing the animal.  We've given it a health check.  - All right, bird. 

 - We've attached a telemetry device, which I'll show you, and then we release the chick back into the wetland.  And I've now been through 78 of these events.  And in every case we have very, very high degree of confidence that they have reunited with their parents. The parents don't go very far. They're not right next to us by any means, but they don't go far and they reunite very fast. And so, again, our job is to take biological samples from these birds, take measurements. I'm actually doing a study looking at these birds' stress responses, acute stress response. So we try to take our blood sample very quickly after we lay hands on them, and then we take a second sample 12 minutes later to look at how the incline of that stress response may vary depending on various conditions. And we will compare that to values we get from adults at a later point. If there's a minor injury, again you've got a veterinarian embedded in your field team to help take care of that.  We attach, now we're using actually a newer generation of telemetry tag. This is what's called a GSM tag, or it's basically a cellular device. So as soon as this bird reaches a cellphone tower at the right moment, it will actually get a ping. It will make contact and dump all of its spatial data into our network, basically, via cellphone.  And so you can imagine if we're doing this with several animals, you're going to get both individual histories but then you'll get this snapshot of the population in much more detail. So this is the actual history of that chick that we just looked at and their migration this past fall. In fact, if you look at the, if you could track the dates there, you'd actually see the bird was only flying for not even a week to make that entire 2500-mile distance. They, typically in fall, will stage in central Saskatchewan and feed in agricultural fields. So they spent a month in Saskatchewan before they pushed on south. And this is the range of stopover sites that were used by birds that we marked with these devices between 2009 and 2014. And the interesting thing here, I think, is that the vast, vast majority of these sites that these birds stop at during their migration are on private land. And there are real conservation challenges on those private lands. We think that we've got enough protected public lands and landscapes that are good for cranes available to them, but it turns out that they use quite a bit more habitat than we ever imagined previously. And that's the kind of thing that was pulled together by the USGS, Fish and Wildlife Service, and Canadian Wildlife Service through this study. But as I said, we did try to add additional biological value by doing a number of other studies of the cranes themselves and looking at their parasite communities, looking at some of their clinical pathology, their blood protein measures, some behavioral measures and things like that. Things that might help us as, if nothing else, baseline data so if this species gets into trouble in the future, we've got a reference point that we can come back to. But now we're into the second phase of this project, and that's what I wanted to sort of finish up with on the whooping crane side of things quickly. And that is because Canadian Wildlife Service and Fish and Wildlife Service are becoming increasingly concerned about oil and gas development throughout this bird's migration range, and wintering range in particular. Wood Buffalo National Park is pretty unlikely to be developed in a significant way, but there could be ramifications to the hydrology and contaminants if the oil sands region in northern Alberta goes, expands significantly beyond where it is just south of the park. But we, through that initial telemetry phase, we found out that birds stopped in the oil sands region, the mineable area. And they even overnighted on tailings ponds. And there's a lot of concern about this. So if you look at the inset map here to the right, this is the mineable area, sort of the designated region within which oil sands mining can occur. Here's the southern border of Wood Buffalo National Park. The nesting grounds are probably about right here, just off the figure. So this bird landed in a tailings pond with its family or with its parents overnight. Probably in and of itself not the largest potential for some kind of toxic exposure, but you could imagine some birds, over repeated stopovers, may pick up or be at risk of something that that is. And so this is of concern for them. And then the US Fish and Wildlife Service is also a bit concerned about oil and gas development in and around the National Wildlife Refuge in Texas. The Aransas National Wildlife Refuge was formed, actually, such that the United States government owns the surface rights but not the mineral rights. And so if you look at all these red dots right here, this is the mainland portion of the refuge known as the Blackjack Peninsula. There's all sorts of oil and gas wells all over the peninsula. You see several throughout the bay systems here as well. Also, this is a major shipping channel. I think here some of you can get a feel that there's almost a line here and certainly right here. This is the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway. This is as busy as the Mississippi. And this completely bisects the National Wildlife Refuge. So there's a ton of barge traffic there. So the possibility of a spill  So, in all, Olivier and his team have registered 262 cranes in the capital region alone. Remember the number I gave you before. We thought there were 500 left in the wild. That's a huge proportion of the population that has been poached and is in captivity. And Lord knows how many birds were lost, you know, along the way to make that happen. And out of that 262 number, 196 birds have been released in the wild in Akagera. And, again, the idea is to supplement. One, it's really to make a good thing happen out of a pretty terrible situation. And so this is much less a conservation biology or population recovery program as it is an anti-trade, live bird trade program. But we have an opportunity to potentially supplement the population in this savanna park in the eastern part of Rwanda with these cranes as well, which I think is a great thing, and hopefully reverse a declining trend for this species in central Africa. One last project I want to tell you about quick involves white-naped cranes and kind of a remote relationship that I've got with a conservation outfit in Mongolia. This is the distribution of white-naped cranes. This is a vulnerable species in East Asia with breeding populations in Mongolia and northern China and far eastern Russia. And they winter predominately in two or three places. At Poyang Lake, a large, inland, freshwater lake system, very similar to the Great Lakes almost, in southern China. And then also in the DMZ in the Koreas, as well as at a place called Izumi in Japan. And so this species we know is in a bit of a decline but seems to have a stronghold in eastern Mongolia. And we've worked with Dr. Nyamba Batbayar from the Mongolia Wildlife Science and Conservation Center in Ulaanbaatar. We're trying to turn this raptor biologist into a craniac. He seems to really like cranes a lot, so we're working on him quite a bit. We've been able to find funding, actually, from the US Forest Service and their international programs to help with rangeland conservation, which is really kind of the biggest issue with regards to wetland conservation and what is a fairly dry ecosystem. And what our small project is doing is trying to make use of some non-invasively acquired samples from the cranes to tell us a little bit about their potential exposures to various contaminants. And so we're using eggshells from hatchings and feathers that are shed from the adults onto nest platforms like this or that are taken from live chicks because Nyamba and his team are banding the resulting chicks at about two days of age, right around August 1st just like the whooping cranes, and they're able to pluck a feather or two from those birds harmlessly. And we can test those for a variety of substance, persistent organic pollutants, as well as heavy metals. And so one of the things that we have done is worked with his team to conduct a pilot project where they're already monitoring this production of this endangered species. Already charting these nesting sites. Now we're just asking them to collect materials off of this website, or this nesting site, and then get them analyzed just to inform us a little bit on an issue that we have very little information on cranes from, because cranes are hard to grab. As you've sort of seen from my work with whooping cranes, it's really hard to understand what kind of exposure they have on a landscape to things like persistent organics, or heavy metals for that matter. So I always like to end with something cute. This is a pretty extraordinary find. Now this means that, yeah, that second egg may hatch out in another day or two, but I'm sure they went ahead and took the eggshell off of that nest site for testing. I just wanted to use those few stories as sort of illustrations of this kind of collaborative partnership between the veterinary school, in particular, although this relationship between ICF and the university cuts across many, many departments, actually. But for my world in veterinary medicine, it's been a really interesting journey to watch, again over about this 35-year period. And