re: Whooping crane hatches in Louisiana for first time in 77 years

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Clyde Tipton

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They're all tracked as best as possible, but I'll get more specific on that later in the post.

The cranes we have here in LA are shipped here on a private jet when they are about 6 months old. They are limited to learning behavior from biologists in crane suits (you can google for images, ) so they don't learn how to migrate. The population in LA is a non-migratory one and designated as a Non-essential Experimental Population (NEP).

That being said, when our cranes do learn how to fly they make exploratory flights for the most part and some adult birds have sort of developed mini migration routes within the state. Some of them even visit Texas for a good part of the year.

So to answer your question, they aren't raised to migrate and we don't teach them like other projects do in the U.S., but they do have regular flyways they use.

To touch more on the tracking,

Population is sitting at 42 right now (44 if you include the chicks). When the project started it was fairly easy to track all of the cranes but as the numbers have grown it has become more difficult. Each crane is outfitted with a GPS transmitter and a select number are outfitted with a VHF transmitter so the biologists can track them in the field with telemetry equipment. These transmitters eventually crap out and/or get damaged or dirty and thus yield insufficient location data. So there are always plans to try and capture the birds in the field to change out their equipment and just do a quick health assessment.