77 On the migration battlefront 



During the fall migration four years later the Leader-Post, in 

 Regina, carried a front-page story, with three photographs of a 

 whooping crane that had been injured, perhaps by gunshot, east 

 of Weyburn. This bird was cared for by a local veterinarian, who 

 amputated the left wing and placed the left leg in a cast. The bird 

 was then loaded into a U.S. Fish and Wildlife plane, which hap 

 pened to be on hand, and transported to Texas, but it died en 

 route. 



The editor of the Toronto Globe and Mail wrote: 



We doubt if the existence of whooping cranes makes the 

 slightest difference to the balance of nature or to the destiny of 

 man. But it's comforting to think that there are still people 

 who can take a profound interest in such things as the nesting 

 habits of the whooping crane, the diet of the porpoise, the loco- 

 mobility of the snail or the hereditary peculiarities of the fruit 

 fly. It helps maintain and fortify whatever sanity remains. 



No doubt very few people read Thoreau any more. Above all 

 Thoreau sought for and found reality in nature. Among men, as 

 Norman Foerster once wrote, "he found manifold evasion and 

 deceit covering the reality," and this sent him to nature, which is 

 artless. Today we might not agree altogether with Thoreau's esti- 

 mate of his fellow men, but we do agree with those who believe 

 that he found values in nature that should be known and reck- 

 oned with by all men of sense and good will. Sanity, sincerity, 

 artlessness, reality if these can be more than mere words to us, 

 then they can be the keys to something very good and eminently 

 worthwhile. Even more worthwhile, in the long run perhaps, than 

 a bank balance but there I am afraid not everyone will agree! 



As of early 1953, with the whooping-crane flock alarmingly re- 

 duced in numbers in spite of all our previous efforts, the National 

 Audubon Society inaugurated a new campaign aimed at reaching 

 everyone living along the 2,000-mile migration route from central 

 Saskatchewan to Aransas Refuge. In the first week of September, 

 as the whoopers were preparing to take off on their long journey, 

 a special news release was sent to newspapers all over the country. 

 Public service announcements were mailed to TV and radio sta- 



