Rare Bird

In the shrinking spaces between the nation's cities, such adaptable species of wildlife as the white-tailed deer and the meadow lark manage to thrive and multiply. Not so the whooping crane, tallest (5 ft.) of North American birds. A stately, aloof marsh dweller with white plumage, black wing tips, a cap of bare red skin atop its head and a trumpetlike cry that can be heard two miles away, the whooping crane (Grus Americana) has become for U.S. conservationists, naturalists and nature lovers a symbol of their fight to save rare species from extinction.

At last count there were exactly 27 whooping cranes left in the world: one at the San Antonio zoo, two at the New Orleans zoo and 24 at the Aransas National Wildlife Refuge on Texas' Gulf Coast. If the cranes would just stay at safe, secluded Aransas, they might increase--though not very fast, since whooping crane couples go steady for a few years before mating. But every April the flock flies off to breeding grounds near Canada's Great Slave Lake--all except one loner that, for reasons that baffle ornithologists (and possibly other whooping cranes), stayed on at Aransas last year. On the flight north and the return trip to Aransas in the fall, a few whooping cranes get shot every year by hunters. As a result, the species hovers perilously close to the vanishing point. The Aransas flock numbered 34 in 1950, and 28 last year.

Last week a U.S.-Canadian committee called the Whooping Crane Advisory Group gathered in Washington to consider some schemes for keeping the whooping crane from going the way of the heath hen and the passenger pigeon. Shelved: a proposal to capture several pairs of cranes and try to breed them in captivity. Left pending: a more modest proposal to capture a lone crane and try to mate it with the one in San Antonio. A difficulty in this scheme: since adult whooping cranes look alike to human eyes, the chances would run only 50-50 that the new pair would really make a pair. Maybe even whooping cranes find it hard to tell the difference. If so, that might be one reason why the whooping crane is a very rare bird.

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