The harrowing 5,000-mile flight of North America's wild whooping cranes

We were 800 feet up in the air, flying in a helicopter with an international team of scientists over the vast boreal forest encompassing Canada’s Wood Buffalo National Park, when one of them shouted the alert. “Bird at nine o’clock!”.

Pilot Paul Spring circled the helicopter left, tilting for a clearer view of one of the countless pools of water stretching to the horizon. Rimmed in sand and tamarack trees, the surface glowed iridescent. In the middle of the wetland, we could make out a pair of snowy white specks, though they stood roughly five feet tall at ground level.

“There’s a chick,” said Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC) wildlife biologist John Conkin, training his binoculars on a rust-colored bird, slightly shorter than its parents, high-stepping in the marsh. Spring spotted a semidry piece of land and brought us to the ground. Conkin, his ECCC ecologist colleague Mark Bidwell, and the other crane catchers, U.S. Geological Survey biologist Dave Brandt and Canadian wildlife veterinarian Sandie Black, piled out of the chopper.

They had only 12 minutes to track down and capture the elusive target: a wild whooping crane chick designed for traversing boot-sucking mud, woody brambles, and bulrushes. Any longer and the team would have to call off the chase to avoid stressing the birds too much.

As the researchers vanished into the bush, Spring and I eased off the ground and zoomed up to 500 feet for an aerial assist. Sensing the humans’ approach, the crane parents flapped their giant black-tipped wings and departed, no doubt reluctantly leaving their flightless offspring behind. “I’ve got eyes on the chick,” Spring said to the group, who could hear him through the walkie-talkies attached to their vests. “It’s just below the chopper. Come toward the chopper.”

The team crashed through the underbrush, trying to push forward faster than the soggy terrain could pull them down. In a well-practiced maneuver, Conkin approached the chick; got hold of its beak, head, and legs; and carefully tucked the bird under his arm.

Six minutes, 36 seconds: bird in hand. Now came the more technical part. Panting and sweaty, the group unpacked their gear. Brandt, a seasoned wildlife biologist who has banded at least 150 wild whooping cranes in his career, held the chick on his lap, supervising Conkin as he affixed a transmitter to one leg and color bands (blue, yellow, green) on the other.

Meanwhile, veterinarian Black performed a checkup, examining the bird’s eyes and taking stock of its body condition. She collected biological samples—blood, feathers, saliva, and oral and fecal swabs—for testing at the lab to reveal things such as the bird’s sex and if it had been exposed to harmful chemicals or diseases, including highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI). Then Bidwell moved in to help slip a camouflage Velcro harness around the chick and weigh it on a hanging scale.

They spoke in low voices. When their work was done, Brandt cradled the chick like a football and carried it to the edge of the marsh. There he gently set it down and dashed away. That chick—now known to the annals of science as 15J—fled in the opposite direction, pausing briefly to ruffle its feathers and shake its new leg jewelry before receding into the safety of the marsh, reuniting with its parents.

These whooping cranes embody one of North America’s greatest conservation success stories. Yet they remain the rarest of 15 crane species found throughout the world and are still endangered. Scientists estimate that more than two centuries ago, some 10,000 whooping cranes lived in North America. But they were no match for steady habitat loss and hunters in the 1900s who killed them for food, sport, and plumes to supply the millinery trade during the gilded age. By 1941, there were only 16 migratory whooping cranes left, all of them traveling a seasonal gauntlet of nearly 2,500 miles from northern Canada to the Texas Gulf Coast.

Over the past 70 years, a raft of protections provided by grassroots conservation, legislation, habitat preservation, captive breeding, and research have slowly brought the population back. Today there are more than 800 birds, with over 530 in the central flyway migratory flock and much of the rest divided almost evenly between captivity and experimental reintroduction programs in Louisiana and Wisconsin. Still, many crane experts say it’s too soon to remove the birds from the endangered species list. The whooping crane recovery plan, written under the authority of the Endangered Species Act, has three main strategies to build both ecological and genetic stability. The first is to grow the migratory central flyway population large enough to survive a potentially catastrophic event, such as an outbreak of deadly bird flu. The second is to maintain a captive population to provide further insurance against calamity. And the third is to establish two additional self-sustaining wild flocks to help restore whooping cranes to other areas of the country where they lived historically.

Based on the current rate of population growth, some say the earliest we could plan for a victory party—albeit very tentatively—is about 2050. “The central flyway flock is halfway there,” George Archibald, co-founder of the International Crane Foundation, told me. “And neither of the experimental flocks are self-sustaining at this moment.”

Only about one-third of chicks like 15J survive to reach their breeding age of four or five years. They’re killed by predators such as bobcats or coyotes or die of fatigue and starvation during migration. They face man-made dangers including polluted wetlands, poaching, and power lines that kill millions of birds each year.

Considering the whooping cranes’ plight, I wanted to get a closer look at the efforts to save them. They are the polar bears of the bird world. If they disappear, we will have failed to save one of the planet’s most beautiful species, a symbol of hope and an ambassador for vanishing wilderness—and all of the species that live there. My visit to Wood Buffalo National Park sparked a monthslong journey—with several important detours—as I tracked 15J’s hazardous trip.

Even after more than a century of research, bird migration remains one of nature’s greatest mysteries. How do the animals navigate over long distances? Is their migration route encoded in their genes or learned? Can they adapt their migrations to avoid modern-day threats, including energy development and increasingly extreme weather?

Technological advances in satellite telemetry and long-term monitoring are helping crane biologists unravel some of these mysteries. Since 2009, 178 cranes from the central flyway flock have been fitted with solar-powered tracking devices that collect location data. In addition to being granted the rare opportunity to fly with crane biologists in Wood Buffalo National Park, I was given a chance to receive updates about 15J and the cohort of 17 other “J-birds” tagged in August 2022.

The first update arrived a few weeks later around lunchtime one day in mid-October. I was at my desk sipping a cup of soup in New York; 15J was airborne and moving south, beyond the park, an area larger than Switzerland, with no cell coverage. Likely motivated by cooling temperatures and high northwest winds, she and her parents departed from Wood Buffalo and arrived the next evening, more than 500 miles away, in Saskatchewan.

Like many other whooping cranes leaving the park, 15J and her parents took a long pit stop there, resting and refueling in the prairie potholes, shallow wetlands created by receding glaciers about 10,000 years ago, and on the northern edge of the Great Plains. Millions of birds stopping over in this region increasingly face threats such as runoff from farming chemicals including fertilizer and pesticides. But in early fall, it also provides birds with a buffet of leftover waste grain in the agricultural fields as well as insects, amphibians, and other small creatures in the wetlands. The cranes typically linger in these vital staging grounds for a few weeks.

On November 3, 15J and her parents crossed the U.S. border into North Dakota, starting their southbound push. Three days and 300 miles later, 15J’s transmitter pinged a tower in South Dakota. As the birds gradually worked their way down the flyway, they stayed in some places for days and barely touched down in others. On November 14, almost 300 miles and another state south, they stopped for a night along Nebraska’s Platte River, where cranes roost on shallow mid-river sandbars and forage in braided side channels, agricultural fields, and wet meadows.

Conservation photographer Michael Forsberg, who’s documented whooping cranes for the past four years, saw 15J there in the pale light of one morning, probing for food along the river with her parents and a lone sandhill crane. He texted me from the river: “I just spent the last two hours with 15J on the Platte. Can’t believe it. They just took off. They’re heading to where it’s warmer. It’s cold here. The river’s freezing up. It’s starting to snow.”

As the number of healthy whooping cranes increases, however, such pit stops may hold a more existential threat. A year earlier, biologists surveying birds on the Platte had counted a group of more than 46 whooping cranes—the biggest flock of migrating wild whoopers that anyone alive today has witnessed in the United States. Some experts said the sighting was a sign the cranes are learning to once again flock together in a large group, a natural tactic for survival, but one that also prompted concern. When such a large percentage of a population clumps in one place, there’s the risk that an extreme weather event or disease outbreak could severely knock their numbers back.

Recently, HPAI has killed millions of other birds in 81 countries. Wildlife managers are on high alert for outbreaks in critically endangered bird populations, including whooping cranes. In Baraboo, Wisconsin, the International Crane Foundation has taken biosecurity measures to protect the cranes in its captive facility from exposure to wild birds that could transmit the virus. Today the organization still raises whooping cranes to be released into the nearby wetlands. It also supplies some eggs to a promising project in Louisiana that is reintroducing cranes to the same wetland from which they vanished some 70 years ago after hunting wiped them out.

While 15J continued her November journey south, I boarded a plane to Louisiana to see the whooping crane class of 2022 graduate from the Freeport-McMoRan Audubon Species Survival Center in New Orleans, where the six-and-a-half-month-olds had become capable of flight, at which point they can be safely released into the wild.

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Since the spring of 2011, the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries has been leading this reintroduction project. In the first season, biologists released 10 captive-bred youngsters at the White Lake Wetlands Conservation Area in Vermilion Parish, about a four-hour drive west of New Orleans. They’ve since added more juveniles to the flock, which lives in Louisiana year-round, because some bird populations don’t migrate if they’ve only ever known one place and their needs are met. The state closely monitors the birds, often with help from cooperative landowners who tolerate cranes foraging in their rice fields and crawfish ponds. Louisiana’s flock is currently composed of about 80 birds. The goal is to establish a self-sustaining population of approximately 120 individuals, including 30 reproductive pairs, for a decade without restocking.

I arrived before dawn to witness the reintroduction day, when the cranes are rounded up from their grassy enclosures at the Species Survival Center and trucked down to White Lake to be released into the marsh. Richard Dunn, the center’s assistant curator, met me inside the gate and laid out the plan. After catching 10 young cranes from their enclosures, a team of biologists would weigh them and do a health check. Then each bird would be tucked inside a cardboard box with breathing holes and loaded into a van for the drive to White Lake.

At White Lake, we were greeted by Eva Szyszkoski, a wildlife technician with the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries. Szyszkoski oversaw the birds as they were banded and fitted with tracking devices. Then the cranes in their boxes were shuttled onto a flat-bottom boat and ferried down a long canal to an area of the marsh enclosed with netting. A decoy crane stood inside the enclosure, welcoming the young birds to their new home.

One by one, each crane was removed from its box and carried by a white-costume-wearing biologist, disguised to prevent the birds from imprinting on people. As the humans waded into the muck, cradling the cranes, the birds’ heads bobbed on their long necks. Freed into the pen, they flapped their wings, stretching after a very long day.

The next morning, Szyszkoski returned to find them all milling around, looking a little antsy to fly. Soon the nets would be opened, inviting them to disperse throughout the area. It’s not uncommon for many of these birds to die within their first year of being released. That may be partly because captive-raised cranes haven’t experienced the wild before—they’re naive, she said, and living in close proximity to people, which means a high chance of collision with power lines and fences. More than a dozen whooping cranes have been shot and killed over the course of the project. Occasionally, some just vanish without a trace.

More than 1,600 miles into her journey, 15J was flapping a route through America’s heartland. On November 15, her transmitter connected with a cell tower in Oklahoma, a state where one of the largest wind farms in the U.S. had recently come online.

As policymakers and the energy industry work to reduce the country’s carbon footprint, there are concerns about how eco-friendly energy advancements and habitat disturbance may affect migratory birds such as whooping cranes. A recent study showed these creatures avoid wind farm areas, preventing them from using some important stopover sites. At least 5,500 turbines have been erected in the birds’ migratory pathway, and over 18,000 more are planned. So far there’ve been no reports of whooping cranes being killed by turbines, but the accompanying increase in power lines is a major concern to conservation groups, who continue to advocate for careful site placements that may reduce the risk of potential collisions and for making power lines more visible with reflective markers.

One day and 260 miles later, 15J arrived in Texas near Fort Worth. By Thanksgiving, her transmissions went dark. USGS biologist Dave Brandt told me she was likely out of range of a cell phone tower in the state’s 115,000-acre Aransas National Wildlife Refuge, established in 1937 as a safe haven for migratory waterfowl and other wildlife. If so, that would mean her first fall migration was a success—she’d traveled some 2,500 miles over the course of about a month and could spend the winter resting along Texas’s Gulf Coast.

This picturesque vista of coastline, salt marshes, and tidal ponds is the winter stage where whooping cranes and their lifelong mates perform elaborate courtship dances, spinning in pirouettes, hopping and flapping, bobbing crimson-capped heads, and bugling their namesake calls.

But even on these wintering grounds there are threats, including coastal development and sea-level rise caused by climate change. Some scientists predict rising seas and subsequent saltwater intrusion will convert more than 50 percent of the Texas Gulf Coast’s freshwater wetlands to open water by 2100. Meanwhile, freshwater inflows are declining because of persistent drought and thirsty cities such as San Antonio upstream. Changes to salinity in the coastal estuaries pose problems for blue crabs and wolfberry plants—primary food sources for whooping cranes. Some conservation groups have warned that without more thoughtful conservation of this larger ecosystem, the whooping crane could lose its only wintering home before the end of the century.

In December I met Brandt in Texas to attempt to locate 15J and other J-birds in their winter grounds. Standing along the Intracoastal Waterway, we looked out over a salt marsh stretching at least a mile. It seemed like a large area but was a fraction of the historic marsh devoured by development in recent decades. Suddenly, two whooping cranes flew up from behind a grassy dune, white feathers gleaming in the sunlight. “They’re here because this just doesn’t exist anywhere along the coast anymore,” Brandt said of the rich habitat. “This portion of the peninsula has about 40 percent of the population wintering here.” Shortly after dawn the next morning, we boarded a fishing boat and spent eight hours fruitlessly searching for 15J along the Aransas refuge and nearby shorelines. We did, however, find several other whooping crane families, including a male bird, 11J, tagged around the same time the previous August. He was walking along the salt marsh begging—peep, peep, peep, peep—for his parents to share the blue crabs and wolfberries in their beaks. They seemed intent on teaching him to find his own food.

Next evening, on my way home to New York, I got a text from Brandt: 15J’s transmitter had “checked in,” revealing her location was within a mile of where we’d cruised along the coast.

Now another full migration cycle through spring and fall has passed. Each time, 15J has proved to be the most elusive traveler among the J-birds. I often receive updates about others almost daily, but I’ve heard about her only a handful of times. Whenever there’s been a long gap, I’ve worried: Did she collide with a power line? Get eaten by a coyote? Was she shot by a poacher? Or did she succumb to an illness?

If all goes well, 15J will be among the now 536 recorded whooping cranes preparing to depart Texas this spring, when their instincts signal it’s again time to arrow north. In the span of a month, they’ll travel 2,500 miles to Wood Buffalo National Park, where many of the adults will build nests and lay eggs. With luck, in a few more years it will be 15J’s turn to join that cycle too, helping her species continue its climb back from the edge of extinction.