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FEATURE STORY

Dances With Cranes

Dave Brian Butvill

It was a courtship like nothing the world had seen before. A bespectacled and balding man in his mid-30s hesitantly opens the door to a wooden shack tucked among the woodlands of central Wisconsin—then strikes a provocative pose. Neck outstretched toward the sky, chest pushed out, and arms held stiffly back, he remains still while a chalk-white bird not much smaller than he struts out of his country abode.

Sporting a scarlet cap and a playful black eyemask, wingtips colored like long, black leather gloves, she greets her suitor with a seductive rustling of her feathers, then begins an elegant dance. Leaping into the air and kicking her legs, the bird, a whooping crane named Tex, taps out the steps to the crane mating ritual. The man follows her lead, flapping his arms, bowing, and tossing sticks into the breeze.

This scene, aired on “The Tonight Show” in 1982, dazzled millions of Americans as George Archibald told the story behind his crane dance. Tex, a vital member of one of the most endangered bird species on Earth, was hopelessly imprinted on humans and wouldn’t mate with another crane. Archibald, acting the part of surrogate mate, jump-started her hormones with his performance. She was artificially inseminated and gave birth to the celebrated chick Gee Whiz.

It was just one example of how far the former director of the International Crane Foundation (ICF) would go to ensure the survival of these birds. With 11 out of 15 crane species threatened with extinction, Archibald set out on a mission more than 30 years ago to save the world’s cranes. Today, thanks in large part to Archibald’s gutsy, indomitable vision, North America’s whoopers are making a comeback, and species from Russia and China to Thailand, Mozambique, and Vietnam are reclaiming their native homelands. No one saves even a single species alone. But if cranes had a hero, that man would be George Archibald.

The story of how Archibald came to dance with Tex actually dates back to a time long before he was born. In the mid-1800s, European settlers pushing west began converting the wetlands where cranes nested and wintered into farmlands. They also hunted the birds for their lucrative feathers, which were sold in eastern cities to adorn ladies’ hats.

By 1941, key whooping crane breeding sites lay encased beneath the concrete sidewalks of Chicago, and the world population of whoopers—by some accounts once 20,000 strong—consisted of 15 birds that nested in northern Canada and wintered along the Texas coast. A single tornado or other catastrophe could have sealed the fate of whooping cranes, as legendary conservationist Aldo Leopold once put it, “to live forever by not living at all.”

It was summer 1976 when Archibald, operating a crane research start-up out of a barn, convinced a breeding facility in Maryland to send him “problem bird” Tex. Born of parents from the Canada-Texas flock when it numbered about 30 birds, Tex was a feathered goldmine of rare crane genes. Yet, after years of pairing her with males back east, she hadn’t laid a single egg. In the wild, female ovulation is sparked by bonding with a mate. Tex wasn’t turned on by her male kin.

Archibald felt he could win her heart. First, he moved his office into her pen. “I subdivided it with chicken wire,” he says. “I had a desk, and I could write on an old typewriter.”

Throughout the summer and following spring, he passed the daylight hours in Tex’s pen, and the nights with his wife Kyoko in their nearby cabin. He danced with Tex several times a day, and helped her construct a nest from sticks and grass. His dedication proved him a worthy mate. Come mid-May, following artificial insemination, Tex laid her very first egg. “So I knew it could be done,” says Archibald. Alas, the egg was infertile.

It would take six more years before Tex would fledge a chick. In 1978, one died just before hatching; in 1979, the egg was soft-shelled and broke. While Archibald was in China over the next two years, someone else sat in for him, but Tex didn’t lay any eggs. She missed her significant other. In many ways a psychological mess, she was crane enough to remain faithful. Cranes, with lifespans of up to 25 years, are thought to mate for life.

When Archibald returned in 1982, Tex hatched a healthy baby boy, Gee Whiz. Three weeks later, Archibald flew out to Los Angeles to discuss his remarkable success with Johnny Carson. That night, Tex was killed by a raccoon.

“It was really spiritual, though,” says Archibald. “I was reading the Bible the morning of the show to try and get strength, because I thought Carson might make a fool of me. I came to the scripture, If a man is thirsty, let him come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as the scripture says.... Suddenly the phone rang: Tex is dead. I continued reading with tears in my eyes...streams of living water will flow from him.

“The timing was just unbelievable. After seven years of work and before speaking to 22 million humans, I knew that Tex was meant to go at that time.”

Archibald takes comfort in the fact that Tex’s legacy lives on in the wings and feathers of her kind. Today, Gee Whiz is the father of many whoopers.

Like Tex, Archibald had identified with a different species at birth. Growing up in rural Nova Scotia, Archibald’s earliest memory is of crawling behind a line of ducklings and their mother. As a boy, he raised pet peacocks and traveled the Atlantic Coast in search of seabirds. Little George’s fascination with the animals eventually led him to the renowned Cornell Lab of Ornithology in New York to study crane behavior and evolution.

It proved a bittersweet experience. “I came from the Canadian backwoods and suddenly I’m in a preppy atmosphere where everyone has a political opinion,” says Archibald.

Modest to a fault and known by colleagues and friends today as a gentle, deliberate, and genuinely kind soul, Archibald didn’t fit the Cornell student mold of the time. It was the late 1960s, and as the United States plunged deeper into Vietnam, student riots paralyzed university campuses across the nation. “[The whole environment] didn’t sit right with me,” says Archibald. If the peaceful quiet of his country roots nurtured an appreciation for flying creatures, the volatile and polarized atmosphere at Cornell cemented his bond with birds. “The cranes helped me through that difficult time,” he says. “And I’m indebted to them for that.” This sentiment fueled not only a lifelong devotion to cranes but has influenced the lengths to which he will go to safeguard species. He started repaying cranes fresh out of college.

When he left Cornell in 1971 he had a grant in hand to study red-crowned cranes wintering on the Japanese island of Hokkaido. He lived in an abandoned house with no windows. “I wore everything I had at night, including a snowmobile suit, and slipped into my sleeping bag with a flask of whiskey,” Archibald remembers. Each morning he would rise with the sun and creep over to nearby wetlands to study bird behavior.

By spring, he and his Japanese colleagues had discovered that the entire flock, which was thought to nest somewhere in Siberia, actually settled down to raise young in a single marsh on the north end of the island. That same marsh was also slated for development.

Archibald led a campaign against the development, speaking at universities throughout Japan and on national television and radio. It culminated in a speech to the royal family. Thanks in large part to his hard work, the critical nesting site was preserved. Since then, the site has grown into a 250-mile-stretch of protected marshland, and red-crown counts have more than quadrupled from 167 to 800.

A couple of winters later, Archibald secured permission from the South Korean army to study cranes in the Demilitarized Zone, the heavily guarded buffer between the North and South. Camping with the soldiers in their bunkers and living off their rations of dried fish and rice, Archibald would emerge each dawn from the underground barracks to search for birds among giant rows of chain-link fences sprouting warped loops of barbed wire and flanked by landmines. It was a landscape President Bill Clinton later labeled “the scariest place on Earth.”

But Archibald saw something different. “The whole area is a no man’s land, all tidal flats and grasslands perfect for cranes,” he says. Still, every evening he’d be sure to get home before dark, as sentinels in the surrounding hillside bunkers had orders to shoot to kill after sundown.

Before spring set in, Archibald discovered that the region’s white-naped cranes—about half the world population—took a month-long break from migrating in an estuary being drained for agriculture. His national crusade eventually resulted in a 160-square-mile crane sanctuary.

Archibald’s personal successes didn’t stop there. In 1976, he masterminded a massive project to save Siberian cranes, considered the most endangered crane species of all. Along their 3,000-mile migrations across Asia, the three flocks in existence at that time visited eleven wetland-starved nations. These included Pakistan and Afghanistan, where the animals are still hunted. His plan helped establish Russia’s first crane breeding center, protected wetlands in India and China, and forged an unprecedented pact between all eleven nations to “save the cranes that cross their borders.”

Since then, he’s fought on behalf of cranes from the Himalayan highlands to the Australian outback and everywhere they fly in-between, racking up awards such as the United Nations’ Global 500 Roll of Honour for Environmental Achievement and the Netherlands’ prestigious Order of the Golden Ark.

Yet of all Archibald’s achievements, the most influential by far has been the establishment of the International Crane Foundation.

ICF is located in an area of Wisconsin prone to sprouting conservation superstars. The preserved shack of Aldo Leopold, whose A Sand County Almanac literally rewrote how conservation gets done, rests just down a quiet country road from the Foundation. John Muir, the wandering wilderness activist and champion of Yosemite National Park, spent his teenage years one town to the east.

Archibald settled in the area in 1973. He and Cornell Lab buddy Ron Sauey, both disheartened by the dire status of cranes, had decided to do something about it. Ron’s dad owned a vacant farm right outside of Baraboo, and he offered to let the fledgling biologists use it for a dollar a year.

“They had no [other] resources,” says Jim Harris, current president of ICF. “The odds of anything happening that would last were...” he laughs, unable to find the right word. “It’s hard to believe.”

The young twenty-somethings were full of optimism and eager to do good. They converted horse stalls into crane pens, such as the one where Archibald courted Tex, and within the year persuaded domestic and international zoos to send them nearly 150 birds. By the time Tex joined the crowd, they had already bred five species, including the first captive hooded cranes in the world.

Today ICF serves as a springboard for crane conservation and reintroduction projects on all five continents (excluding South America and Antarctica) where cranes are found. “Our whole thing is to be catalytic,” Archibald says. “To get things going and then do something else.” In this way, ICF has had a hand in protecting nearly 13 million acres of habitat in 64 nations. Most recently, in 2003, they landed a $10 million grant from the Global Environment Fund to aid Siberian cranes.

Yet the longest-standing fight is taking place right in their backyard. North America’s whooping crane has come to symbolize the conservation movement, as the population of 15 in the 1940s has multiplied to about 400 today. The struggle has demanded more teamwork and ingenuity than perhaps any other to date.

Ten conservation veterans including Archibald have crafted a plan to save whoopers and reintroduce them to areas similar to those of their historic range. In addition to maintaining the vestigial Canada-Texas flock, which has grown without human assistance to about 190 birds, it calls for the establishment of two more wild flocks. One is a nonmigratory flock, introduced into Florida in 1993. It currently contains about 100 birds, including several of Gee Whiz’s offspring. In 2002, this colony fledged the first wild-born whooper chick in the United States in more than 60 years. Scientists named it “Lucky.”

Establishing the third population, one that migrates between Wisconsin and Florida, would prove a much more complicated endeavor. Young cranes, or colts, learn migratory flyways from their elders. To teach captive-bred birds a novel migration route, biologists would have to lead them.

Past attempts at teaching birds new migration paths had included conditioning young to follow handlers driving trucks. In another study, birds were driven to their winter destinations. The trucks stopped periodically en route to allow the animals to fly around. The hope was that they would connect the dots on the return migration. Unfortunately, neither experiment was successful.

Then in 1993, just as the whooping crane scientists were mulling over how to proceed, Canadian pilots Bill Lishman and Joe Duff made history by showing geese new migration paths using ultralights. A huge success, the affair was subsequently depicted in the 1996 hit movie “Fly Away Home.”

Yet when Archibald suggested having these pilots guide whoopers south, his colleagues almost laughed him out the door. Unlike geese, which fly by constantly beating their wings, cranes unfurl eight-foot-wingspans and surf air currents to their winter destinations. To trail an ultralight would require energy-intensive flapping for more than 1,200 miles. Besides, nearly 50 homeowners along the route would need to volunteer their lands for stopovers.

Archibald’s contagious enthusiasm convinced everyone it could be done. “He often comes up with these fantastic ideas,” says Joan Garland, ICF’s education coordinator. “For most people it would end there. But he makes them work.” Garland remembers when the pitch evolved into a plan. “We were all sort of snickering at first. Now, here we are in our third season watching cranes follow ultralights south.”

And so it was that on October 17, 2001, eight trained whooping cranes and three buzzing ultralights flapped and soared away together from a frost-encrusted Wisconsin meadow. Below them, a caravan of motor homes carried biologists and portable pens.

The trip proved perilous. Facing battering headwinds, dangerous weather, and a roaring interstate highway the birds refused to fly over for three days, the crew covered less than 100 miles in the first week. Frustrations quickly mounted. “Last night we had rain, wind and hail the size of mothballs,” lead pilot Joe Duff wrote in the migration journal (operationmigration.org/Field_Journal.html). “Today we have thunderstorms, lightning and colder temperatures. Tomorrow...tornado warnings. All we are missing is an earthquake, a tidal wave and anything that remotely resembles luck.”

The following night, winds howling through the narrow valley in which they were camped tore apart the cranes’ temporary pen, and the panicked birds escaped. After nearly five hours of searching in a vicious downpour, the ground crew managed to recapture all the birds save one. The next morning they found the eighth—dead beneath a power line, the number one killer of wild whooping cranes today.

The rest of the trip would take on a similar feel, as they pushed over 3,000-foot ridges and through the rising smoke of forest fires. The Federal Aviation Association, in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks, grounded the crew for a week and detoured their route several times around nuclear power plants.

Finally, after 48 long days, the seven survivors descended upon their Gulf Coast getaway, a part of Chassahowitzka National Wildlife Refuge in central Florida. Come spring, on April 10, 2002, the five cranes that survived the winter pointed their bills north. Less than two weeks later they parachuted down onto the very patch of earth in Wisconsin they had departed in fall, and became the first whooping cranes to migrate in the east in a century.

The ultralight flights, which have so far established a migratory flock of 36 birds, are undeniably a conservation milestone. Yet Archibald is, characteristically, already pushing the concept to new heights. Pairing Siberian cranes with world-class hang gliders, he’s hoping to lead captive-bred Siberian cranes south from Russia next year. “One of my ultimate goals in life is to see Siberian cranes reestablished in India,” says Archibald. That country’s population recently dropped from 75 birds to a single pair, which disappeared in 2002.

Hang gliders and cranes should make good migration partners. Both climb thermals and can cover hundreds of miles per day, versus only 50 to 75 with ultralights. “It’s more about training the people than the birds,” he says. Gliders and sandhill cranes pulled off a successful test run last summer on a ranch in Southern California. The Asian migrations, at a whopping 3,000 miles, will be the longest manned journey ever attempted in the history of foot-launched aviation.

In the meantime, Archibald has moved on from ICF. After 27 years, he handed over the reins to Jim Harris in 2000. Yet he’s not ready to give up crane research. With an endowment of approximately $700,000 set up for his personal research, the 57-year-old feels he’s just getting started. “There’s so much more to do it would take ten lifetimes to complete it,” he says. “I’ve taken up the Indian subcontinent.” Combining educational tours with wetland restoration and crane reintroduction projects in India, Afghanistan, Tibet, and Nepal, Archibald finds himself busier than ever.

Now back on home soil, he’s moved his office into a 1912 restored farmhouse in the Baraboo hills, and his life seems to have gone full circle. He raises peacocks—and guinea hens, geese, mandarin ducks, white pigeons, turkeys, and 15 varieties of chicken, “one for each species of crane”— and runs around the world in search of birds. A pair of wild sandhill cranes has chosen to nest on his and Kyoko’s property. Archibald is building a pond for new guests. But this time, he says, he’ll leave the dancing up to them.

Dave Brian Butvill is a freelance writer living in Costa Rica.