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I wish the title of this update could read “Another Successful Capture”, but unfortunately it cannot. In fact, if I wrote an update after every capture attempt we did this fall and winter, 27 out of 35 would have to be titled the same way as this one. To clarify, we do not and did not have 35 birds with nonfunctional transmitters. The 35 attempts include the 6 failed and 1 successful try on female #12-03, the 6 failed and 1 successful try on pair #’s 8-04 and 19-05 (we eventually captured only female #19-05), the 8 failed and 1 successful try on pair #’s 3-03 and 17-03 (where we only caught female #3-03), and well, you get the picture. Our most recent attempt was conducted in Knox County, Indiana on December 18, 2009. The target in question was male #17-03. His transmitter failed last summer, and as mentioned above, we were able to capture his mate, #3-03, earlier in the year at Necedah National Wildlife Refuge (NWR). Usually we do not have capture attempts so late into the year, but since the weather was in our favor (high 40’s/low 50’s) and #17-03 and his mate were hanging around with five other Whooping Cranes (including DAR #38-09), we figured this was a good opportunity to give it a shot. From past experiences, capturing birds is much easier when they are associating with newly released chicks that have not developed quite as strong an aversion to the costume as older, longer released birds usually do. My field supervisor, Dr. Richard Urbanek of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, was already stationed near the group of seven cranes. I, on the other hand, was sitting on a group of eleven cranes (including seven of the nine 2009 DAR chicks) at the Muscatatuck NWR about three hours away. I left the eleven birds on the morning of the 18th and headed over to Knox County. Once I arrived, Richard and I formulated a plan for capture, but as usual, the cranes had a different plan. Some of the cranes (pair #’s 16-02, 16-07 and chick 38-09) were quite curious, and approached pretty close to us as we walked out into the field in our costumes. Of course, the crane we wanted to capture was almost always the farthest one away. We were unable to get close enough to capture him before he and his mate started making pre-flight calls and eventually flushed, prompting the rest of the Whooping Cranes to follow. They looped around the cornfield and landed farther away, at least half a mile from their previous location. We decided to go after them at their new location. Hauling our gear with us, we trudged through the muddy field, toward the birds, which we could not see because they had landed on the opposite side of a small hill. We quickly learned that the mud in the field was cakey and sticky, and soon we both had an extra 10 pounds stuck to each boot. With every step we took, the footprints we left behind looked less and less like a human’s and more and more like Bigfoot’s. Finally we reached the group of seven, and once again, they flushed, this time as soon as they saw us. They landed in a field that we did not have permission to go into, and after some discussion, we decided to hang around for an hour or so to see if they would return to their original field. They did, but the results ended up being the same. They flushed back into the “no go” field, and we decided to call it a day. I headed back to Muscatatuck where I heard my birds at roost on the refuge and retired for the day. Next summer and fall will be a new capture season. Hopefully we can capture #17-03 easily, but I am very wary about saying any capture will be easy, since that is rarely the case. Update and photo by Eva Szyszkoski, ICF Tracking Field Manager.
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