This update comes from Tom Stehn, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologist at Aransas NWR, Texas.
The Aransas-Wood Buffalo whooping crane flock reached a record population of 266 at Aransas in December, 2007. No mortality was documented during the 2007-08 winter. During the spring 2008 migration, the Cooperative Whooping Crane Tracking Project documented 39 confirmed sightings of whooping cranes in the U.S. Central Flyway. An excellent production year in Canada in 2008 totaling 41 fledged chicks from a record 66 nests should equate into a substantial population increase in the Aransas-Wood Buffalo flock in the 2008-09 winter. However, threats to the flock including water and land development in Texas, wind farm construction in the migration corridor, and tar sands waste ponds in Canada all increased in 2008. The captive flocks had a good production season. Twenty-two chicks are expected to be reintroduced into the eastern migratory population in the fall of 2008 bringing that flock to 91 total birds. Two chicks of high genetic value have been added to the captive flock. Production in 2008 lifted the total population of wild (n=387) and captive (n=152) whooping cranes to 539. Production in the wild from reintroduced flocks in 2008 was a disappointing ?zero?. In Florida, 5 chicks hatched from a total of 3 first nests and 2 re-nests, but none of the chicks survived past 25 days of age. In Wisconsin, all 11 nesting pairs abandoned their nests just prior to expected hatching. The Whooping Crane Recovery Team met in September, 2008 in Wisconsin. The team decided that the probability of success was too low for the Florida non-migratory flock to justify any further releases of captive-reared juveniles. The Team recommended continuing steps to proceed with reintroduction of non-migratory whooping cranes into their historic range in Louisiana if studies can demonstrate that this would not increase the risk of infectious bursal disease to the Aransas-Wood Buffalo flock. The Recovery Team also recommended doing field tests with GPS satellite transmitters on migratory cranes in preparation for radioing birds in the Aransas-Wood Buffalo population. This project has been proposed by the Platte River Recovery Implementation Program to focus on whooping crane use of habitat and causes of mortality in the migration corridor. A species of black fly not found in Alberta is suspected to be a cause for at least some (all?) of the Wisconsin nest abandonments. Steps will be taken to deal with this problem next spring. Bob Russell, USFWS -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://moumn.org/pipermail/mou-net_moumn.org/attachments/20081002/76f98da1/attachment.html
