Birdwatchers rejoice: It’s almost time for the cranes to come back to Texas.
Flocks of sandhill cranes, and the world’s only flock of wild whooping cranes, will be settling in the Lone Star State for the winter – everywhere from the Panhandle to the Gulf Coast. However, if you’re watching the skies, you might see plenty of sandhills, but not nearly as many whooping cranes.
The latter have been endangered for decades; recent estimates from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service say there are only about 550 of them left. That’s up from a low point of only 21 cranes nearly 85 years ago.
Raising that number has been an interesting journey, but there’s still a long way to go.
Owen Fitzsimmons, the Webless Migratory Game Bird Program leader for the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department, joined the Standard to talk about the birds, their history and where we can expect to see them as they travel south. Listen to the interview above or read the transcript below.
This transcript has been edited lightly for clarity:
Texas Standard: Tell us about this journey that the cranes will be making this year. Where do they come from and where do they typically land?
Owen Fitzsimmons: Well, both species breed up in northern Canada. The sandhill cranes that come through Texas are what we call the mid-continent population. They number about a million birds currently, so they’re doing very well.
Their breeding range is actually huge. It extends from eastern Siberia all the way to Wisconsin, and they make their way through the central part of the U.S. and spend most of the winter here in Texas.
Where in Texas? Where can you find them and what do their habitats look like?
Most of the sandhill cranes in Texas are going to be found somewhere in the Panhandle, down through kind of southwest Texas.
We do have another portion of those birds that end up on the Texas coast, usually mid-coast down towards like Corpus Christi and up towards Galveston. They’re typically found in agricultural fields around wetlands; they spend their nights roosting in wetlands. So they can be pretty much anywhere.
Explain for us, what’s the difference between whooping cranes and sandhill cranes? What makes one so different from the other, and why does it seem like there’s so many of one, and so few of the other?
Yeah, that’s a good question. There’s a lot of conservation challenges with both, but whooping cranes have always been a little bit more specialized.
They have a smaller wintering area on the Texas coast around the Aransas National Wildlife Refuge, and they feed on slightly different things, whereas sandhills have kind of taken advantage of all the agriculture that has sprung up over the past 150 to 200 years in North America, and then they have a little bit more varied diet – they’re more opportunistic feeders. So they’re doing really well.
Visibly, what seems to be the key distinctive features of each?
Sandhill cranes are typically going to be a gray bird. The adults have kind of a red head, whereas whooping cranes – which are the largest cranes in the world, or largest cranes of North America anyway – are big and white with black wingtips.
The whooping crane has been endangered for quite some time. Now we’re seeing the numbers start to rise. That sounds like an interesting success story. What steps have folks been taking to restore that population?
There’s a very long, very interesting and colorful history with conservation efforts for whooping cranes.
As you said earlier, they numbered just a couple dozen maybe back 80, 90 years ago, and the current population, I think the last estimate was actually 575 birds in the wild population, which doesn’t sound like a lot, but for a bird that breeds so slowly, that’s a huge step up from where they were.
But their history includes a guy named George Archibald, who was the founder of the International Crane Foundation, dressing up and acting like a male crane to get some captive breeding operations going there. There’s a lot of really interesting things going on with their conservation history.
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So how long do these birds tend to live?
Both species, and cranes in general, are typically long-lived – you know, 20, 30 years or more.
They reproduce pretty slowly. They typically lay about two eggs and only rear about one colt – what we call a young bird – per year, and they don’t really reach sexual maturity for two or three or four years.
How much longer do you think it’s going to take for this species to recover at that slow pace?
That’s a good question. Again, it doesn’t sound like it’s much of a recovery, but compared to where they were 80 years ago, it’s huge. But there’s a long way to go for whooping cranes.
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