No longer will majestic whooping cranes fly over Georgia guided by birdlike ultralight aircraft.
The annual avian spectacle ended last month as a half-dozen birds and their pilots waited in South Georgia, grounded by rain, uncooperative winds and bureaucratic wranglings. Finally, on Jan. 30, the endangered birds left Climax in Decatur County for the final push into Florida and their winter home at the St. Marks National Wildlife Refuge.
The 15-year, $20 million experiment to boost the whooping crane population had ended. So Georgians living along the state’s western and southern edges will no longer hear a distinctive honking sound and look skyward to see a flock of large birds following a weird little plane as it slowly makes its way south.
“It is sad to see the end of aircraft-led migration,” Joe Duff, the chief executive of Operation Migration, said in a statement. “There will be many people who will be disappointed and even a few who will celebrate. But those reactions are all about people, and our mantra has always been it’s about the birds.”
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service ruled last month that the migratory birds don’t successfully produce chicks and raise them in the wild. Of the 250 cranes released since 2001 in Wisconsin, where the annual migrations begin, only 93 remain alive. And only 10 of those birds developed the feathers needed to fly.
Other wildlife experts concurred that the aircraft and the funky suits the bird handlers and pilots wear to appear cranelike aren’t working.
Whooping cranes once naturally migrated along the Eastern flyway between the upper Midwest and Florida until they disappeared in the late 1800s. Operation Migration and other groups sought to teach young cranes the migratory ways of their ancestors. The Fish and Wildlife Service will continue to release captive-raised cranes into the wild east of the Mississippi River.
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