The Edmonton Journal

November 22, 1999.

Canadian man who migrated with geese will teach whoopers to fly away home

ED STRUZIK

• Grus americana
• Status: Endangered
• Main threat: Habitat degradation of the wintering grounds in Texas; power lines; disease
• Numbers: There are 364 — 183 migrating from Wood Buffalo National Park to Arkansas National Wildlife Refuge in Texas; 73 non migrating birds in the Rocky Mountains; and 104 birds in captivity.
• Range: Nests in Wood Buffalo National Park on both sides of the Alberta/Northwest Territories border.
• Size: The male weighs some 7.5 kilograms with wing spans of two metres or more; the female is slightly smaller.
• Breeding habits: Produces two eggs; rare for more than one chick to survive.
• Lifespan: Averages 20 years in the wild. One injured bird that was sent to a zoo lived for more than 30 years.
• Outlook for survival: Tenuous. Disease, natural disaster or a shipping wreck near the Arkansas National Wildlife Refuge could wipe out the one and only migrating flock. Efforts to establish a second migrating flock have thus far failed.

The Canadian who realized his childhood dream of flying with Canada geese and parlayed it into a wildlife recovery project is taking to the air again to help the endangered whooping crane.

Bill Lishman, whose experiences inspired the movie Fly Away Home, will be using his ultralight aircraft to teach a captive flock of endangered whooping cranes from either the Calgary Zoo or the Patuxent Wildlife Centre in Maryland to migrate from central Wisconsin to Florida.

Lishman recently got the go ahead from the International Whooping Crane Recovery team that has been trying to establish a second flock of migrating birds.

There is just one migrating flock of 183 birds in the world. Descendants of 22 that were left in the wild in the 1940s, the birds are currently on their way from the nesting grounds in northern Alberta and the Northwest Territories to the Arkansas National Wildlife Refuge in east Texas.

Lishman is already looking for corporate sponsors to finance an IMAX film of the experiment.

That a team of Canadian and American scientists would entrust Lishman to such an endangered species is a vindication of sorts for the Ontario sculptor.

Fly Away Home tells the story of how Lishman raised 12 goslings and taught them to migrate alongside his ultralight plane. While it was a hit with family audiences, most scientists pooh poohed the idea of using ultralights for endangered species recovery projects.

"It took a while for scientists to realize the potential," Lishman said in a recent interview.

"But two things, I think, played in the decision. One is that we’ve done nine different migrations to date with varying degrees of success. So we’ve proven it is possible.

"Second, there really is no other way of teaching theses birds to migrate."

If all goes according to plan, Lishman will do a trial run from central Wisconsin to Florida next fall with a flock of 16 to 20 sand hill cranes.

If that migration is successful, he’ll do it again the following year with a flock of captive whooping cranes.

Lishman is the first to acknowledge there is a big difference between teaching geese how to migrate and teaching a flock of whooping cranes to fly to Florida.

He learned that the past two years while trying to get sandhill cranes to migrate from Ontario to South Carolina.

In the first year, it took nearly 300 hours of interaction time to persuade the birds to follow him south.

Because the birds had come to identify with their handlers, many ended up landing in schoolyards and on golf courses when they heard and saw people along the way.

Lishman says the strategy now is to reduce the human impact, perfect the training procedures and maintain the whoopers in as natural an environment as possible The trainers will wear special costumes and there will be no talking at all around the birds.

"Whooping cranes are different in so many ways. They’re very solitary, so rather than working with six or eight as we did with Canada geese, we’ll have to work with each whooper individually. They also have a very different vocabulary, and we only understand about five or ten percent of it."