Despite efforts, rare bird's comeback still in doubt

Imagine a graceful white wading bird so tall it dwarfs every other bird in North America.

She'll be out in the marshes soon -- the only surviving wild born hatch of the imperiled, reintroduced Eastern flock of the whooping crane. The bird and her mate are one of two mating pairs that have made a winter home in the Lowcountry. The other pair already have arrived in the ACE Basin.

This couple is still in Indiana, on their way from the Wisconsin summer breeding grounds. They are a storied pair, even among the rare, striking cranes that one wildlife officer called "the biggest white birds you'll ever see."

The Eastern flock's future here is still on tenterhooks. The wild-born female's mother was found shot to death earlier this month alongside a road in Indiana.

Whooping cranes are the endangered, snow-white wading birds with a crimson crown and black-tipped wings. They are renowned for a hair-raising whooping call that flocks sound en masse in the wild. The call, their elegance and an ornate courtship ritual of bobbing, weaving and jumping have endeared them to birders.

"They're kind of dramatic, bouncing up and down, flapping their wings and stretching their heads up," said Mark Purcell, ACE Basin National Wildlife Refuge manager for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, who has seen the wild-born female and her mate perform that courtship ritual. "They're so magnificently large, majestic and striking. When you see one you know it."

The crane is so large that looking at one alongsidea great blue heron would be like looking at a great blue alongside a little blue heron, he said.

In the Lowcountry, where ponds have been named for the whooping cranes that historically haunted them, the idea of seeing one was a not-so-likely notion until a few years ago. The crane once was found from the Arctic to Mexico. Hunted for food, sport and collections and with its nesting wetlands crowded out, the species had been all but wiped out by 1941. The last of the birds was reported in South Carolina in 1850.

The only remaining wild flock wintered in the Southwest until a touch-and-go reintroduction effort of captive breeding and ultralight plane-led migration began bringing back the species to Florida in the 1990s. Then, in 2004, four of the reintroduced birds landed in the Cape Romain National Wildlife Refuge.

Captive breeding of the birds at the International Crane Foundation in Wisconsin has gone well; the flock is now up to 85 birds and 20 hatchlings following an ultralight to Florida. That's despite losing 17 hatchings, an entire season's brood, in a storm in Florida in 2007. But the wild born chicks keep dying. Two of them were lost last summer, one at two weeks old, the other at one month old.

"We believe it was predators," said Joan Garland, of the foundation. But a study is underway of potential factors such as black fly infestation, food availability and behavior.

The foundation hopes to try some techniques in the spring, including controlling the fly population. The breeding success of the two Lowcountry pair could depend on that.

They seem to like it here. The male that is with the wild-born female is one of the original returned birds, having wintered here since 2004. In 2006, he flew in a tight flock with four younger cranes as far south as the Georgia-Florida line. They roosted for the night and in the morning the younger birds took off for their winter Florida home. The male didn't.

After apparently wavering a few days, he turned and headed back to the Lowcountry. The foundation tracking team hadn't quite seen anything like that before, said Sara Zimorski, a team leader. "At some point he realized, 'Hey, this is not where I want to be.' "

This year, the first pair "made a beeline" to the Lowcountry. The wild-born female and her mate have been hanging out for about a week in Indiana just below the snow line, a very defined line of snow accumulation when seen from the air, Zimorski said.

"If they get a good cold snap, she'll move," Garland said.

Reach Bo Petersen at bpetersen@postandcourier.com or 937-5744.