Jim Bradshaw: Before the spaceport, another wetlands story made news

By JIM BRADSHAW
 The hoopla over the long-expected announcement that SpaceX will build a rocket base there pushed aside another remarkable story that came to light this month from the Vermilion Parish wetlands.
Just a few miles from the planned Starbase Louisiana, a little band of whooping cranes made history by producing 10 chicks, the most since the state restored the endangered birds to the White Lake Wetlands Conservation Area in 2011.
Louisiana acquired the 72,000-acre reserve in July 2002, but it took a while to resettle cranes there. It wasn’t until August 2010 that state and federal wildlife agencies announced plans to establish a flock “that lives and breeds in the wetlands, marshes and prairies of southwest Louisiana.”
At that time, there were only 395 whooping cranes in the wild, none of them in Louisiana, and nobody had tried to bring them back to places they’d once lived.
The birds were once regular visitors here. Migratory flocks arrived in south Louisiana each fall, about the same time as ducks and geese from Canada, and we also had a flock that stayed all year in the marsh near White Lake.
However, as Gay M. Gomez points out in a study of the Louisiana wetlands, “by the 1920s and 1930s … people were entering the cranes’ winter haven via …  a growing number of … canals, and, as isolation decreased, so did the birds’ numbers.”
Only 13 birds were counted here in 1939, and storms and predators cut that to three in 1941 and to one in April 1949. That lonely bird was captured in 1950 and taken to Aransas National Wildlife Refuge in Texas.
After that, we had no wild whoopers until February 2011, when 10 young cranes were released in the White Lake refuge.
The eggs for the young birds were hatched in the Patuxent Wildlife Research Center in Laurel, Maryland, the birthplace of the captive breeding program for the cranes; and also at the Calgary Zoo in Alberta, Canada; Necedah National Wildlife Refuge in Necedah, Wisconsin; and the Audubon Species Survival Center in New Orleans.
The White Lake plan got off to a worrisome start. Only three of the cranes were still alive in December 2011.
Wildlife officials said two were killed by predators, one sick bird was euthanized, two were simply unaccounted for, and two had been shot.
Nonetheless, 16 more young cranes were brought to White Lake from Patuxent that month and released two days after Christmas.
When 14 more were sent from Patuxent in late November 2012, wildlife agents said 28 birds were living at White Lake, the largest number in Louisiana in 80 years.
That was still no guarantee that the flock would flourish. The young birds had to get used to the wild, find mates, and raise chicks.
There were high-fives in wildlife offices in April 2016, when, finally, the first wild-hatched chick peeked out of its nest.
This year’s 10 fledglings brings the total Louisiana population to 84 whoopers, and the latest count found more than 600 in the wild in all of North America.
That is far better than in the 1940s, when only 21 could be found, but still way too few.
Gomez interviewed several elderly wetland residents for her book that was published in 1998.
They remembered whoopers as a pest, but they “also felt an underlying admiration for the tall, white birds,” she wrote.
One of them, Claude Eagleson, told her, “It was beautiful to see them up there in the sky, always seven or eight in a bunch, circling and crossing each other like people square dancing. You could hear them for a long way. They’d go down in the sweet potato patch and make a pest of themselves eating the sweet potatoes, so people would kill them. They were good to eat — better than a goose. …  Remember, in those days, all the people had to eat … was wildlife and what they raised. If you didn’t eat from the land, you didn’t eat.”
The prospect of our again seeing square-dancing whooping cranes increases with every hatch.
Their chances get better as the flock grows, especially since we don’t eat them and aren’t supposed to kill them.
But the flock needs to grow, and it still faces the storms and predators that have always been a nemesis, not to mention the newest and greatest challenge to their isolation and to their habitat.
You can contact Jim Bradshaw at jimbradshaw4321@gmail.com or P.O. Box 1121, Washington LA 70589.