64 On the trail of vanishing birds 



you find large numbers of private citizens, predominantly females, 

 going afield to determinedly count birds, equipped with un- 

 bounded enthusiasm, a spotty knowledge of their subject, and 

 inadequate glasses or no field glasses at all? Of course there has 

 been a considerable improvement in field techniques and the 

 over-all ability of bird watchers everywhere in more recent years, 

 but at an earlier date such groups of well-meaning, eager "birders" 

 were responsible for many erroneous and duplicated sight records 

 of migrant whooping cranes that found their way into print and 

 threw the entire picture of abundance completely out of kilter. 

 Perhaps most of the errors were brought about as a result of the 

 practice of accepting reports at second and even third hand, yet 

 nearly all of the reports came from observers who honestly thought 

 they had seen whooping cranes. In a year when some 100 or more 

 migrants were accepted as the "official" figure for Nebraska alone, 

 there were actually less than one-third of that number reported on 

 the wintering grounds. Careful studies convince us that the winter- 

 ing-ground records were for the most part quite accurate. On 

 the other hand, a sincere interest in the welfare of the whooper 

 was demonstrated by the amateur ornithologists and by hunters 

 and other groups in various parts of the country where they could 

 still be observed, either in migration or in their winter quarters, 

 especially those that wintered in southwest Louisiana, and this 

 interest kept alive a general awareness of the species' plight and 

 a desire to "do something" to save it. 



When I drove along the migration route into Oklahoma, Kan- 

 sas, and Nebraska in March, 1947, I met and talked with all sorts 

 of people who wanted to help. The publication of Andreas Fein- 

 inger's photographs in Life helped a lot. It appeared that nearly 

 everyone I met had seen this issue, and as a result they were all 

 keyed up on the subject of whooping cranes. A really active inter- 

 est, though, on the part of the general public was limited to those 

 communities near major stopping places of the birds. At that time, 

 centers of such interest were the towns of Jet and Cherokee, in 

 Oklahoma, where Seth Low, then at the Salt Plains Refuge, had 

 been spreading the gospel; the vicinity of Hoisington, Kansas, near 

 the Cheyenne Bottoms, where U.S. Game Management Agent 



