38 On the trail of vanishing birds 



of Lake Michigan where it once nested are now occupied by the 

 sprawling city of Chicago. The sloughs of northwestern Iowa have 

 long since been drained for the raising of corn and hogs. Reed- 

 bordered lakes in central and northern Minnesota are populous 

 summer resorts, and other former nesting sites in northeast North 

 Dakota and in the lowlands and parklands of the Prairie Provinces 

 are rich crop lands. Even peripheral nesting sites along the Slave 

 River and elsewhere in the Northwest Territories no longer pro- 

 vided the vast isolation these strange wild creatures require, and 

 they too have long been deserted. 



On top of this, the wintering range on the Gulf Coast, and the 

 once broad migration highway between there and breeding areas to 

 the North, gradually and inevitably were overrun with enter- 

 prising and restless representatives of the human race. More and 

 more whooping cranes were killed, for sport and for food, a peak 

 being reached during the 1890s. The greatest number reported 

 as killed met their end in Nebraska, with Texas, Louisiana, Sas- 

 katchewan, North Dakota, Iowa, Illinois, South Dakota, Kansas, 

 Manitoba, and Minnesota close behind, in that order. They were 

 shot on the breeding grounds as they sat on their eggs, and they 

 were shot on migration as they came to earth to feed and rest. On 

 the wintering grounds they were shot when they raided sweet- 

 potato fields in Louisiana, and for sport along the Texas coast. 



From 1912 onward a yearly record was kept of the number of 

 migrant whooping cranes passing over the Platte River in Ne- 

 braska. The reports were often inaccurate, and the result was usu- 

 ally an exaggerated picture of the actual total. Nevertheless the 

 publication of this information, contributed almost entirely by 

 amateurs, did much to keep alive an interest in the fate of this 

 species. In 1941, however, observers in Nebraska reported the 

 sighting of only three migrating whoopers, in 1942 only four and 

 in 1943, just one lone bird. Ornithological and conservation circles 

 were immediately aroused and there were pleas for immediate ac- 

 tion. As I wrote in my monograph on the whooping crane (Na- 

 tional Audubon Society: Research Report No. 3, 1952): "The 

 conflagration that had been smoldering along for more than eighty 

 mortal years had at last blazed into a four-alarm fire! It was about 



