62 On the trail of vanishing birds 



there "the party of Captain Philip Amadas" went ashore in July 

 on Wokokon Island in Pamlico Sound (possibly the present 

 Ocracoke Island?) and "having discharged their harquebas-shot, 

 such a flocke of Cranes (the most part white) arose, with such a 

 crye, re-doubled by many echoes, as if an armie of men had 

 showted altogether." These could hardly have been whooping 

 cranes, from the location, the date, and the nature of the descrip- 

 tion. "Cranes" could just as well have been herons or egrets, and 

 the "crye" could just as well have been the combined voices of 

 terns and skimmers, which were doubtless abundant in that re- 

 gion. Nevertheless, a number of authorities, beginning with 

 Thomas Pennant in 1785, have thought they were whooping 

 cranes, and some authors argue quite illogically in an effort to 

 prove them so. 



Other more recent observers, like the English botanist Thomas 

 Nuttall who floated down the Mississippi in 1811, simply made 

 an honest mistake in identification. Yet his description of a 

 "mighty host" of whooping cranes passing over in migration has 

 survived and has been widely copied and repeated. The fact is, 

 the whooping crane did not follow the Mississippi flyway within 

 historic times, and Nuttall's host was undoubtedly made up of 

 lesser sandhill cranes, which are still an abundant species. Yet even 

 the great Audubon failed to distinguish correctly between the 

 young whooper and the sandhill crane, so a mere botanist can be 

 forgiven. 



For a time, even after they had been reduced in numbers by 

 the guns and the farming activities of settlers, whooping cranes 

 were enthusiastically pursued as game birds. An item printed in 

 a periodical called Sports Afield A Journal for Gentlemen, pub- 

 lished in Denver in 1888, described the hunting around Grand 

 County, Colorado, in April of that year: "Ducks and other water 

 fowl are not as plentiful as they have been the seasons before. 

 Cranes, though, are very numerous this season some of them 

 big white fellows. One was shot recently that measured 6 feet, 6 

 inches." This measurement probably referred to total length, 

 from the tip of the bill to the tip of the toes, so this was an un- 

 usually large specimen. There are extant a number of narratives 



