Wildlife news

I was checking out TBO.com to see what sort of horror and madness is going on today. Lots, it seems. Abby may be commenting on lots of things today. But one jumped out at me: Endangered Cranes Killed In Storm.

The entire group of young whooping cranes that came south this year with the assisted migration died in the recent storm. Mostly because they were in pens. Makes it hard to get to high ground.



You can learn about the assisted migration program through the Whooping Crane Eastern Partership site.

Long ago and far away, Abby worked for a federal agency involved in this program. I had the opportunity to go out and see a lot of this firsthand. You can say what you want about the federal government, but there are a lot of phenomenally bright, devoted, intellectually curious and hardworking people in your federal natural resources community.

The whooping crane migration was a nightmare of coordination and committees. But still, somehow, it happened every year.

The young whoopers in the first year of the migration suffered a pretty hard toll from bobcats once they made it to Florida. So the "crane people" decided that in future years, the youngest group of cranes would be penned to protect them.

Yes, they decided, nature must take its course, but the young cranes were too valuable to let bobcats eat them all. So - the pens.

They're still penning the cranes to prevent evolution from weeding out the ones with no good bobcat survival skills. The pens cost an entire cohort of cranes this year. Let's not discuss the actual investment of your tax dollars those cranes represented. The best laid plans of mice and men...