Learning to fly

hollywood has even made a film about it. Fly Away Home tells the story of a father-daughter team and their efforts to lead a flock of young geese to a new home and of their eventual success.

Reality, however, is a totally different ball game, far from the big screen's happy ending. In October 1997, Kent Clegg, a us biologist and ultralight pilot, narrowly escaped what might have been a fatal crash when a golden eagle zeroed in on the small flock of whooping and sandhill cranes that he was leading on a 1126.3-km flight from Idaho to New Mexico. "The birds are important, but are not worth losing a pilot over," Clegg said later. Yet, he and many others like him are trying their best to establish new flocks so that the cranes' status can be upgraded from endangered to threatened by the year 2020.

The famed flock of some 180 whooping cranes -- North America's most prestigious bird -- in the Arkansas Refuge, Texas, usa , is considered at risk by conservationists due to their proximity to the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway, one of the world's busiest commercial waterways. Pollution from tonnes of petroleum and chemical products and the threat of an accidental spill that could easily kill dozens of cranes and destroy the habitat put an enormous question mark on the birds' future.

This is where people like Kent Clegg come in. The recovery plan calls for the creation of self-sustaining crane populations of 25 breeding pairs at two different sites before their status can be upgraded. A nonmigratory population has been started in central Florida's pasture lands. Now, the team is trying to establish a separate flock that would migrate north in summers for nesting and back south in winters.

Small songbirds and shorebirds are genetically programmed to navigate at night between nesting and wintering places, using magnetic and celestial cues. But large water birds, such as the whooping and sandhill cranes, travel by day and need to be led on their first flight south by their parents. The young birds return to their natal marshes with the family group before taking off on their own the next spring. But how can young chicks -- raised in captivity without an adult bird -- be taught to migrate? And how to achieve this without disrupting the birds' social and mating behaviour?

Enter the ultralights. Imprinting crane chicks on a human pilot and using the ultralight as a surrogate flock leader gained momentum after similar experiments with geese by Canadian artist and pilot Bill Lishman. Lishman had conditioned a flock of goslings to the sound of his voice and the plane's engine as they hatched. He even trained them to walk and then fly behind the aircraft across wintering places in Virginia and South Carolina.

But a seven-kg whooping crane with its eight-foot wingspan can pose a formidable threat to both the plane and the pilot. However, beyond the safety concerns are more daunting scientific and biological questions. Will the cranes, like Lishman's geese, survive the winter and migrate back north if they are dropped in an area without any other wild cranes? Clegg's flock of sandhill cranes returned to the vicinity of his Idaho ranch but wintered and departed in the company of thousands of other sandhill cranes. Biologists are still awaiting the return of the flock led by Lishman to Virginia. If they do, that would mean their instinct to return to their birthplace is strong.

Subscribe to Daily Newsletter :

SUPPORT US

We are a voice to you; you have been a support to us. Together we build journalism that is independent, credible and fearless. You can further help us by making a donation. This will mean a lot for our ability to bring you news, perspectives and analysis from the ground so that we can make change together.