37 A giant of beauty and grandeur 



trailer, and headed for New York for a briefing. Sewall Pettingill, 

 who had been studying the cranes for the past year, was there; also 

 Clarence Cottam, Gus Swanson, and Phil DuMont of the Fish 

 and Wildlife Service, and John Baker, president of the National 

 Audubon Society. When I had been sufficiently stuffed with in- 

 formation and good wishes, we resumed our travels, heading for 

 Texas, where most of the whoopers spent the winter and where 

 my studies of this phase of their life would have to begin. 



The Whooping Crane Project was set up in 1945 as a coopera- 

 tive undertaking between the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and 

 the National Audubon Society. Some years before, when on the 

 Texas coast working with roseate spoonbills, I had seen my first 

 whooping cranes and wondered idly what poor, unsuspecting soul 

 would someday be assigned the rugged task of making a full-scale 

 study of them. I hadn't the slightest notion that it would be me! 

 The initial investigations were begun in Canada by Fred Bard of 

 the Provincial Museum in Regina; and Dr. Olin Sewall Pettingill, 

 Jr., of Carleton College, was appointed Research Fellow and made 

 the first field studies in 1945-1946, including the first airplane 

 search for the northern breeding grounds. When Pettingill re- 

 turned to his teaching chores at Carleton the job fell to me. 



For almost half a century these birds have been advertised as 

 on the verge of total extinction. As early as 1912 Forbush pro- 

 nounced them "doomed to extinction," and the following year 

 Dr. Hornaday predicted that "this splendid bird will almost cer- 

 tainly be the next North American species to be totally exter- 

 minated." Ten years later, in 1923, an article in The Saturday Eve- 

 ning Post actually announced that "the Whooping Crane, perhaps 

 the most majestic bird of all our feathered hosts, has traveled the 

 long trail into oblivion." To use the familiar phrase, this report 

 of its demise was somewhat exaggerated. The truth is that while 

 seriously reduced in numbers by that year, the whooper was far 

 from being at the end of its long trail. And in the thirty-three 

 years that have passed since that premature announcement it has 

 held its own with an amazing vigor and stubbornness. 



The causes behind its depleted range and reduction in numbers 

 should be crystal-clear. The Illinois marshes at the southwest tip 



