47 A giant of beauty and grandeur 



ecological problems it was equally essential that time be alloted to 

 other phases of the life cycle and to an appraisal of the whooping- 

 crane situation as a whole. During that first winter I flew on 

 several aerial surveys with Bob Tanner, including a painstaking 

 search along the entire coastal strip from the Louisiana border to 

 Mexico, a total of nearly 1,000 miles of actual observation and 

 search from the air. No additional whoopers were found. In Mex- 

 ico, Dr. George Saunders, of Fish and Wildlife, undertook to 

 cover possible wintering areas during his aerial surveys of the 

 wintering waterfowl population. In many years of similar flights 

 in that country, George had never observed any whooping cranes, 

 and he was unable to find any on this occasion. With his help, 

 and the testimony of old records, I eventually pieced together the 

 place that Mexico occupied in the whooping-crane story. It proved 

 to be entirely a matter of history. Except for a fine wintering group 

 in nearby Tamaulipas on the Rio Grande Delta Plain, now long 

 since gone, the whooping crane's presence in Mexico had not 

 been of outstanding importance. 



These were some of the experiences of that first Texas winter 

 when we began our intimate acquaintance with the whooping 

 crane. As spring aproached and the big birds began their spectacu- 

 lar dances and demonstrated in other ways their growing restless- 

 ness, we too began to cast our eyes to the North. For it was our 

 plan to trace their flight as far along the trail as we could follow. 

 Many of the answers lay in that direction, and the breeding 

 grounds were still a very big and incomprehensible unknown. 



