74 On the trail of vanishing birds 



with the establishment of Aransas Refuge in 1937, the only migra- 

 tory flock left was this same one that survives today. All of the others 

 had disappeared and the surviving group had been reduced by 

 April, 1939, to only 18 birds. Another flock survived at that time 

 in Louisiana, but they were nonmigratory in their habits and num- 

 bered only 13 birds. The entire Louisiana group has since been 

 extirpated, a tragedy that has been described elsewhere.* The for- 

 tunes of the wintering flock in Texas have seesawed up and down 

 during the seventeen years of which we have detailed records. 

 Their numbers, as of April in each of these years, plummeted to 

 an all time low of only 15 individuals in 1942, but reached an en- 

 couraging April high of 33 in 1950 (actually 34 was the high of 

 November, 1949, but one bird was lost over the winter). The 

 average has been 24 whooping cranes. Once we had learned the 

 situation on the wintering grounds, there remained two other 

 spheres of interest: the nesting region somewhere in Canada and 

 the migration highway in between. In the beginning we knew 

 very little about either. It has been a long pull, but we are now 

 much further ahead with our knowledge of all three areas. The 

 migration route can now be traced on a map almost from town to 

 town, and the importance of this knowledge to our efforts at pre- 

 venting the shooting of these great birds during their hazardous 

 flight should be perfectly obvious. 



I have already told something of my early experiences along the 

 migration route. From that time on the situation showed a steady 

 improvement through the fall flight of 1949. We estimated that 

 in the years 1945-1949 only 7 seven whooping cranes were lost, 

 while the over-all gains amounted to a clean 12. Then something 

 went haywire. It seems unbelievable, but in spite of the great 

 amount of public good will that had been generated during the 

 first years of our campaign, there were still many people who took 

 an entirely different view. It is not often that we see or hear an 

 outright expression of this alien attitude, but several incredible 

 samples have been sent to me. One was a letter from a distraught 

 farmer in Saskatchewan. He told of certain of his neighbors who 



* See The Whooping Crane, Research Report No. 3, National Audubon So- 

 ciety, N. Y., 1952. 



