18 BirdWatching • September/October 2019
will be inundated by rising waters by the
year 2100. Harrell’s projections show
that the region that could support 3,249
birds in 2019 could only sustain 1,668
birds 81 years from now — a nearly 50
percent decline in carrying capacity.
That doesn’t necessarily mean that
today’s f lock of 500 or so will be cut
down to 250 by 2100. No one has a
crystal ball. But it’s undeniable that the
warming planet poses a significant
challenge for a species with such low
numbers.
“Things could get tight in terms of
habitat available on the coast,” Harrell
says. “I would say that’s a rather
conservative model in that our assump-
tion behind it is that [the birds] continue
to just use coastal marsh habitat.
Historically, that’s really the only thing
that we can model on going forward. But
if we look at some of our other reintro-
duced populations, we see them using a
wider variety of habitat types, including
agricultural habitats. [For example,] the
Louisiana birds are using rice agricul-
ture pretty heavily.
“The best-case scenario is not only
will they use coastal marsh but that they
will spread into other habitat types
farther inland. We’ve seen a little bit of
that during drought periods.” During a
recent drought, he notes, many cranes
spent several months at Granger Lake in
central Texas, showing that the birds can
winter at a freshwater reservoir. “So,
they certainly have a capacity and
capability to use other types of habitats.
It’s just a matter of will they as their
population pushes beyond the marsh?”
Archibald, the man who has done
more than anyone else on behalf of
Whoopers, says he’s encouraged by the
recent growth of the Aransas-Wood
Buffalo f lock, and he’s guardedly
optimistic for the future.
“I’m not complacent to the fact that
we have great dangers with sea-level
rise, with the threat of contamination
from an industrial accident and from
the tar sands developments in Alberta,
which are just south of Wood Buffalo
National Park, with hundreds of acres
of poisoned lakes created by the eff luent
that the cranes could land in and that
the fragile arctic ecosystem could be
screwed up by.”
For me, it was impossible to listen to
Harrell’s report and think of it as a
theoretical discussion of a far-off future.
Just 18 months earlier, the town in which
we were meeting, Port Aransas, andMustang Island, which it sits on, took a
direct hit from Hurricane Harvey. Its
132-mph winds damaged nearly every
structure in the city. Port A, as it’s
known locally, was busy with tourists
and construction and certainly recover-
ing during my visit. But as the climate
crisis intensifies, larger and more
destructive hurricanes are forecast to
occur more often.
If Harvey, which came ashore in
August 2017, had hit a few months later,
when Whooping Cranes were back in
the region, the bird’s story today could
be considerably different. The storm
swamped the Aransas refuge, causing
significant damage to the Whoopers’
winter home. The refuge’s Blackjack
Unit lost 20 to 40 feet to erosion during
the storm. In May 2019, the Fish and
Wildlife Service said it will spend
$27 million to replace more than
8 miles of levees, 3 miles of canals, and
33 water-control structures and harden
7 miles of shoreline.
The challenges ahead for the Whoop-
ing Crane are great. And while I
certainly learned disquieting news
during my visit to Port A, the festival
named after the iconic bird also gave me
renewed hope that advocates willWhooping Cranes by the numbers
Aransas-Wood Buffalo flock 505*Eastern Migratory Population 87Louisiana Non-migratory Population 75Florida Non-migratory Population 12Cranes in captivity 163*Total 842* 2018 numbersEMERGING: A Whooping Crane hatches on a nest in Louisiana in May. None
of the six chicks that hatched in the Louisiana flock this year survived.
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