University Place

Cranes: Ambassadors for Conservation

Welcome, everyone, to Wednesday Nite @ the Lab. I’m Tom Zinnen. I work here at the UW-Madison Biotechnology Center. I also work for UW-Extension Cooperative Extension, and on behalf of those folks and our other co-organizers, Wisconsin Public Television, the Wisconsin Alumni Association, and the UW-Madison Science Alliance, thanks again for coming to Wednesday Nite @ the Lab. We do this every Wednesday night, 50 times a year. Tonight, it’s my great pleasure to introduce to you Rich Beilfuss. He’s the CEO of the International Crane Foundation up in Baraboo. He was born in Chicago, Illinois. But he can’t help that. [laughter] He went to high school at La Grange High School, then went to Northwestern University and got an undergraduate degree in economics. Then he came here to UW-Madison and got two master’s degrees, one in civil engineering and one in water resources management from the Nelson Institute.

Then he got his PhD here at UW Madison at the Nelson Institute. He started working with the International Crane Foundation as a graduate student in 1988. He became their CEO in 2010. As I mentioned in my little missive, I never saw sandhill cranes when I was a kid, and it’s amazing to me when you see them fly over the countryside and roads of Wisconsin now, because I always think, what’s the blue heron doing stretching its neck out? [laughter] Oh, it’s not, it’s craning its neck out and therefore it’s a crane. I think it’s a wonderful story that we get to hear tonight on cranes as ambassadors of conservation for all over the world. Please join me in welcoming Rich to Wednesday Nite @ the Lab.

– Thanks. [applause] Great. Good evening, everyone. Can you hear me okay here? Yeah. Good. Before I start my talk, I want to shout out two of the many celebrities in the audience here right now, but I want to acknowledge Ginny Wolfe, who is a very long-serving member of our board of directors, great to see Ginny, and Tran Triet, who I didn’t know was coming and I’m going to talk about him in a little bit, but Tran Triet has led our work in Vietnam for close to 20 years and is just a stellar conservationist. It’s great to see you here, Triet. You’re going to see a picture of yourself later. [laughter]

So it’s great to be here. As Tom said, I’ve been with the International Crane Foundation for a long time. And part of the story I’ll tell you tonight will maybe explain why I’ve stuck around so long and why I have this weird background of economics and engineering and water and a bit of biology and why all of that relates to crane conservation. That’s one of the stories, take-home messages I hope comes clear tonight. We are a very diverse bunch at the Crane Foundation because our work very much kind of embodies the conservation challenges we face all over the world. And I’ll tell you some stories from different places we are around the world, but I kind of want to start more fundamentally with this, who are these weird crane people up in Baraboo? Why do we exist, and what are we doing? So, I’ll sort of start you off with that. I think many of you have been up to Baraboo to the Crane Foundation.

I don’t know if I can do show of hands on TV. Quite a few. Great. Well, we’re delighted to have you up here. Many people know us from Baraboo but I think a much smaller percentage of the people who sort of know us here in Wisconsin really know us in this role, which is a global conservation organization. We are very active in more than 50 countries. We work with a network of more than a thousand people. We have major regional programs in Asia, Africa, as well as here in North America. And that’s a big part of the story I’d like to share with you tonight. So, why cranes? We sort of talk about what is it about cranes? What’s the quality of cranes that just works for conservation? First of all, I think they’re stunningly beautiful.

Many of the different crane species are stunningly beautiful. They’re also very conspicuous, often with long, white necks. They stand out. They’re huge birds. Birders love them because they’re not little tiny LBJs. You can actually see them and identify them. [laughter] They do these exquisite dances. If you’ve ever been up at the Crane Foundation and see the birds dance in unison call together, you know that, or if you’ve seen them out in the wild, it’s very engrossing to see these beautiful dancing, mating rituals. They’re very good parents.

They actually raise a precocial chick. They’re very good at tending to that chick, and they do a lot of parental care. Most cranes raise one or two chicks. That is a big part of their problem of why we struggle to keep them in the wild. Some raise up to three but that’s about it. So they’re good parents. They do fantastic migrations. They fly over beautiful landscapes. Many of the cranes have long, long migrations.

These are black-necked cranes flying over Bhutan. They also fly over Tibet. So they’re beautiful in flight. And they form tremendous congregations. These are the Eurasian cranes, and this is in the Hula Valley of Israel, actually not up in the north, not that far from Syria, up that way. And they form incredible concentrations, and some of you may know their concentrations or congregations in the fall here in Wisconsin and on the Platte River in Nebraska and so on. And they select a nest and live in beautiful places. They take us to many beautiful places around the world. It’s a great perk of working for the Crane Foundation.

I get to go to a lot of beautiful places and work to try to save them. And because of all that, I think, their beauty and elegance and calls and striking, striking viewing in the wild and all, they’ve been a part of our culture for a very, very long time. This is from Utah. This is a Native American paintings. In Australia, you can find Aboriginal paintings dating back tens of thousands of years with cranes. They’ve been part of our culture for a very long time. Cranes are often on the wedding kimonos in Japan. You see them all throughout East Asia, and they’re actually mentioned in the bible, in the fundamental Hindu texts, including the Ramayana, and the Buddha story of suffering, how Buddha discovered suffering in the ancient Buddhist texts is actually over the shooting of a crane. It’s often falsely identified as the swans, but there were actually not swans in the area where Buddha lived at the time.

So it was actually the shooting, probably of a sarus crane, which Triet right here does a lot of work. So really deep cultural connections. And because of that, cranes are embedded in culture all over the world. The national, the center of the national flag of Uganda is a grey crowned crane, and the national soccer team is called the Cranes. I love that. We’re always rooting for them. They’re on money in many, many different countries, in Japan. The five-cent coin in South Africa is called a blue for the blue crane. They, this is the National Bank in Uganda, the Crane Access Bank.

They are embedded culture throughout. And yet there’s a paradox with that because, on the one hand, they’re loved, really and culturally throughout the world, and yet they’re among the most endangered family of birds in the world, so how can that be? To be so loved and so endangered? The data kind of speak to themselves about the status of the family. There’s 15 species of cranes around the world. 11 of them are officially classified as some level of endangered, either critically endangered, endangered or vulnerable to extinction. Those are all different categories of threat. Only four of the 11 species of cranes are officially not threatened. And three of those species actually have major populations or subspecies that are threatened or endangered. So none of them are just in the clear, even our sandhills that are becoming so abundant right here. I’ll tell the whooping crane story a little better, a little bit later, sorry, but there’s about 500, probably a few less, in the wild.

They hit a low of about 15 in the world. And there’s other cranes that are in really dramatic decline around the world. So they’re loved and they’re very, very threatened. I think that there are three ideas that explain this sort of paradox and also why cranes are great focal point or ambassadors for conservation as we like to call them. I think the first key idea is cranes are really very sensitive indicators of environmental health. For a big bird, and they are very big birds– Cranes include the tallest flying bird on Earth, the sarus crane. They actually have a very sensitive relationship to the environment, and in many cases have very strong responses to changes in water and land. For example, these little dots here are black-neck cranes up in the Tibetan plateau. And they nest in areas up there that are fed by glacial melt runoff from the Himalayas.

And so they’re very sensitive to changes in runoff in that area. They’re a species we’re watching very closely in terms of climate change and change in local conditions. Very much triggered to the availability of water in those high altitude regions. Whooping cranes, and I’ll tell the whooping crane story a little bit later, another bird very sensitive to water and land-use changes along the coast, including a very tight relationship to the blue crab, which is about 90% of its diet. I’ll talk through that story a little bit later, but blue crabs are only available when salinity conditions are right in the marshes where the cranes feed in the water. And we’ll talk about that sensitive story. But when the water is too saline or too fresh, their food source disappears and the birds have no food on that coastal area. Several of the crane species are very tight relationships to aquatic plants that only grow under certain light and water conditions, like the Siberian cranes here. Very vulnerable to changes in water levels.

And other cranes which seem more generalist in some ways, like the sarus crane in India, they feed on small wetlands, but they’re very sensitive to changes in agricultural practice on the landscape. They survive in harmony in some of the most densely-populated areas on Earth, such as in Uttar Pradesh of India. But they have a very close relationship with the way the land is used, and a lot of our program working with those birds, for example, is just focused on that relationship and traditional land uses. So there’s quite a tight connection between cranes and the landscape that’s very important, and I’ll draw that out in some stories later. The number two key issue behind crane work is people come together to work for cranes for conservation on five different continents. The cranes really, we call it through the charisma of cranes, but cranes do draw people together, and we see it time and time again throughout. We are one of the only organizations that, until recently, actually had an active working group of North and South Koreans working on crane conservation issues. There are not many issues on which those two sides are working together, as you can imagine. But the Korean network and the Korean crane meetings have included, and we even until very recently maintained a project in North Korea doing wetland conservation north of the DMZ.

The Siberian crane, we had a major international program trying to bring together people working for the Siberian crane that included Russia, China, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, people in Turkey. It ranged across, included India, Pakistan, Afghanistan. So these are countries that are often not working in collaboration, and there are exciting opportunities that have emerged through work with cranes. Sometimes we bring cranes into the marshes. We bring people into the marshes to work on the cranes. Sometimes we go to the top of tall buildings. Sorry for another plug for Chicago, but I like to take people to Chicago. And so we range from the marshes to tall buildings, but we bring people together and people come together to work for these birds. And one of the outcomes of that are there are all these crane festivals around the world, and if you count up all of them, there are literally hundreds around the world, and there’s some really big ones here in the US.

This is a particularly fun one. This is in the mountain kingdom of Bhutan. And we started this festival 19 years ago with our Bhutanese colleagues there, and it’s occurred now every year for 19 years. And kids flood in from the surrounding hillsides in this area. They create these crane costumes, and they do all these great dances and songs. It goes on for a very long time. It’s like an eight-hour festival or something. It runs all day long, and it celebrates the migratory return of the black-neck crane. A lot of festivals like this.

And the third big idea, which I think is fundamental to how we work, is the understanding that cranes are really flagships. And when you work to save cranes, you’re working to save a lot more than just cranes. I like to say we’re all about cranes, but we’re really about so much more than cranes. Just some examples there, when you think about all of the kind of threats, the land threats we’re dealing with on the landscape these days, invasive species, problems with excessive fires, with loss of wetlands, with watershed degradation, with big dams as I’ll talk about. All of those problems are crane conservation problems. So we find ourselves working in partnerships with organizations that are working to solve big conservation challenges, and in doing so, the great thing is that in a lot of places where we work for cranes, there are actually wonderful flagships or umbrella species for lots of other species that coexist. Sometimes species that aren’t very charismatic and don’t have much of a conservation voice that can benefit from work to save landscapes, to protect water or land around cranes. So we find a lot of nice carryover value, in some cases for species that society may care a lot less about. And fundamentally, too, as we find in many places, crane conservation can be about people and human livelihoods in many places.

And there are real win/win scenarios. We work to be the opposite of the classic, for example the spotted owls battles of the 1990s, where it was all about birds or jobs. You know, people or wildlife. We completely reject these kind of black and white scenarios because we’re looking and a lot of conservation today is looking to find those, the win/win solutions where you can find a place for birds within society, within landscapes that feels a lot more sustainable than when we’re pitted against each other. So, a lot of times when we’re working for people, we actually find ourselves working for livelihoods. So I’m going to draw out four stories. I will tell you one from Asia, one from Africa, and then one from here at home kind of spanning North America for four of the 15 species of cranes of the world. I’ll start with the sarus crane. So I’m delighted to have Triet here.

But don’t correct me if I get anything wrong here. I’ll start with this story. This is one of my favorite stories, and I did my master’s work here at the university back in the ’80s and Vietnam. So this is really where I did the first significant fieldwork myself, and then eventually we passed this work over to the much more confident hands of Triet and others who really took this work and ran with it for 20 more years as our staff and our program leaders. But Vietnam, working in the Mekong Delta of Vietnam, this is the Mekong River in this map, and the Mekong is one of the famous rivers of the world. I believe it’s the ninth biggest river of the world. It’s well known. It’s known for many things, especially its exotic fish, including, in the upper right-hand corner, my favorite, the giant dog-eating catfish. Few things more exotic than a giant dog-eating catfish. But they have a lot of amazing fish, some of the best fisheries in the world on the Mekong.

But it’s also the home to one of the rarest cranes of the world: the sarus crane. It is the tallest flying bird on Earth. You can see a nice pair of them up in the Crane Foundation if you come and visit us. They stand about six feet tall. They’re enormous birds. And this was a great conservation story. We got involved in Vietnam in mid-1980s because of a report that sarus cranes had appeared in the Mekong Delta. And at that time, they hadn’t been seen throughout the war period. Actually, dating back to before the period of French involvement, they hadn’t been seen in the Vietnam part of the delta. And a big reason for that is much of the delta was aggressively drained during the war as part of the war effort.

And following the war, the Vietnamese were very industrious in settling a lot of the delta and became one of the most densely populated rural and very aquatic areas of the world, with people living on dikes throughout that system. So when we got involved, the wetlands of the Mekong Delta were disappearing very, very fast. A lot of the birds were disappearing very fast. And then we had this discovery, and the discovery was by this man right here who was a colonel for the North Vietnamese who had survived during the war in the wetlands of then South Vietnam, living off the resources of South Vietnam, including these big wetlands. And he recognized the value of these wetlands and wanted to set them aside for their timber and other products before the whole of the delta was converted over to development and rice. And he fought very hard and is a real conservation hero for this area right here called Trom Chin, which is about a 20,000 hectare or so wetland in the heart of the Mekong Delta, the biggest remaining wetland in that area. And we got very involved in trying to support that effort in the late 1980s to build water gates to manage waters in that system and try to create a home for a small population of these eastern sarus cranes that have returned. But the big story came after that. As much as we worked for Trom Chin, there were relatively few birds there and other areas more critical for their survival.

And a particularly important place was Phu My, on the border with Cambodia, and that’s where the star of the story, Tran Triet, and others got involved to really demonstrate real meaningful conservation solutions. The work at Phu My really centered on a challenge that was put forth by local government there, which was that they said we’re going to convert this wetland into an agricultural area unless you can come up with an alternative land use that’s more beneficial than converting it to agriculture. That was essentially the challenge. It was slated for development and to be converted like much of the delta had been converted to rice agriculture. Now, there was a wonderful tradition in that area weaving a tall wetland grass called Lepironia, to weave that into traditional products. They made these beautiful mats and everything. So that was an important livelihood activity in Phu My. But the problem was the mats were used for sleeping and drying rice, and they would require about four days of labor to construct and sold for about 50 cents. So these people were in chronic poverty in this area.

But they were on a very important wetland. So the Lepironia Wetland Conservation Project was established just about 13 years ago in 2004. And, really, the idea was to find a sustainable solution that involved building up from this traditional use of these handicrafts but finding ways to use that work, both to generate income for people and to maintain wetland conservation in the area and advance the restoration of this marsh. So a big part of it was scaling up the traditional handicraft production with a lot of quality control, sustainably harvesting the Lepironia, and then, importantly, over time really creating high quality bags that began to sell not only in Vietnam originally but out into other markets in Asia and Europe and to start to market them worldwide for a higher value. And an amazing thing started happening through that work. One is daily income for the people involved in that work started going up and up and up and up with the project. And, number two, the number of households that were actually benefiting from the project was going up and up and up. So it wasn’t just a couple of people originally involved suddenly getting a windfall, but a lot more people brought into production and a lot more money being made in what was an extremely impoverished community. And what’s exciting about that is they started generating real money, not only for the community but actually to support the work of restoring and maintaining this wetland at Phu My.

So restoring and managing Phu My wetland. And so over time a significant proportion of the budget for the work at Phu My could be generated by these handicraft sales, by these traditional products, in addition to generating income for people. In many years, more than 50%, sometimes as much as 80% or more, of the project. Now, that’s one of those illusive, for those of us in the nonprofit sector constantly raising money for the work we do, this is one of those most illusive of conservation ideas of being able to really locally fund work so that you’re not chronically dependent on fundraising, on grants, and everything else. So really trying to generate a significant part of the value for the work and the money to use to pay for the work right on site, so very exciting stuff. And the sarus crane numbers began to recover with good management of the wetland. And as they were recovering in this post-war period, from just a few cranes back in the early 2000s now to 300 to 400 birds in the area, I don’t know what the latest count is, Triet. Somewhere in that order of birds out there. So it’s been very exciting to see the recovery of the birds, more income generated for caring for the birds, and for the wetlands and benefit for the people there.

And most recently it became Vietnam’s newest protected area, the Phu My. So it was sort of formerly recognized that this alternative land use served a higher value than just being part of the broad landscape being converted to rice everywhere else. So that was very exciting getting– but I think more fundamentally it’s just a win/win all around. The wetland is now protected area. It’s more significantly protected. Sarus numbers are increasing, and the health of the wetland, more generally, is improving. There’s more income and more employment, and now the government has an alternative to looking at land use. You know, this project in its exact state can’t be replicated everywhere. We need different and innovative ideas in different areas, but it’s a model for thinking about different ways to use the land that are more sustainable and wildlife-friendly, so I think that’s very exciting.

And now I’ll embarrass Triet to say that it’s also won several awards, and I really give a shout-out to Triet and the team in Vietnam for what I think has been one of those really very illusive examples of where we can really have conservation and livelihoods on the landscape and really see both improving together. And it’s very exciting to me. I’m going to tell another story on a big scale too. I’ve done a lot of work in the Zambezi River Basin. That’s very close to home for me. I did my doctoral work here on the Zambezi and went and lived there with my family for a couple different long stints, including about four years in this area down here near the Zambezi Delta in Gorongosa National Park. And a lot of my focus has been on water in the Zambezi. Water management and water solutions in this basin. And Zambezi is one of these, another vast river system.

Like the Mekong, it’s really the lifeline of southern Africa. It’s the major river system across southern Africa. And it is the lifeline for millions of people who depend on this river. And if you stare at this photo long enough, you’ll find about 20 different water uses: cooking, cleaning, bathing, everything imaginable is provided right on and directly by this river along its length from Angola and Zambia all the way down to the Mozambican coast. It’s also sort of legendary home, most of the African elephants of southern Africa are in the Zambezi River Basin. A lot of the African buffalo are there. A lot of other important species. And it’s kind of a who’s who list of wonderful and exotic places to go for your winter or summer vacation. Really wonderful places all supported by the waters and land of the Zambezi.

Well, it’s also home to this species, the wattled crane. Almost as big as the sarus I was talking about a minute ago. And most of the world’s wattled cranes occur in this river basin. There’s about 8,000, roughly, remaining in the world. About 6,000 of those are within the Zambezi River Basin system. So it’s very important to the future of this bird and a lot of other animals, like elephants and bison and hippos and many, many others. So we got interested, as I mentioned before, I’m a hydrologist, we got interested in this basin about 20 years ago because we were trying to explain this or understand this fundamental system which is that, on the one hand, it’s super rich in wildlife and diverse, or at least had been, and, on the other hand, it had two of the biggest dams in Africa on it, two of the biggest dams in the world on it, and very intensive water resources development. So the Zambezi has really been slated to not only be the water lifeline of southern Africa but also the energy pipeline, energy source of southern Africa. So Kariba Dam, which was the first dam to be viewable from outer space when it was built because the reservoir is so big, was built and Cahora Bassa Dam.

Two enormous, enormous dams, Hoover Dam kind of sized dams, were built. And the whole of the river was slated for very intensive energy production as well as some other less promoted benefits like flood control and water supply. So Zambezi hydropower became a big priority, but the problem was no one was really paying attention to what was happening below all of these dams. It was great to be generating power and the power is needed in the region, there’s no question about that, but there’s no free lunch and a lot of cost came with that production as well. We were starting to read the signs for the Zambezi Delta and the lower Zambezi saying, wow, on the one hand, it has these very rich wildlife populations and, on the other hand, we know nothing about what’s happening in this system and the signs are not good. This was a fisheries study done in the ’80s that showed a lot of things in massive decline very quickly after these huge dams were built. So got involved to try and answer some fundamental questions which is really trying to address how this river has changed over time from these dams and what solutions are possible starting with a crane lens and working up. And there’s been very dramatic changes in the system to start. This, if you could see the full length of this bridge, it was 29 spans across this bridge when it was built in the 1920s.

It was a major river crossing project for its time. The river today is really subdivided into small channels, much of the floodplain is dried up and under regulation for hydropower, it’s just a very changed system. Water stays in the channel through the year, it doesn’t spill into the floodplain, and as a result most of the old channels of the floodplain are not vegetated over and dried out and the floodplain is quite dry for much of the year. Much, much drier than it was historically. Well, we started this big program and there’s really just a couple of take-home points with all this very busy slide, which is we wanted to understand what was the impact of all this river change on the system. What did it mean in terms of the biodiversity, the cranes and other critters, and also human livelihoods. And then try to answer some fundamental questions if indeed the impacts were as serious as we thought. One is, is there enough water available to reverse the impacts with different management? What are the trade-offs among people who need that water? And, basically, how much water does the river need? And how can you get it? How much can you get? So we formed a really unique partnership with the energy authorities in the main countries of the Zambezi, Zambia, Zimbabwe, and Mozambique, the power-generating authorities, to try and tackle this question and try and simulate a new way of looking at these dams. And we started with the wattled crane.

We were looking at unique aspects of its biology and its relationship to water and how it was affected by the change in flooding. But we quickly scaled up. I mean, to be honest, as much as people loved cranes, there’s no way we were going to get involved in energy policy in the region through cranes. It was going to take a lot more than that. And, really, what we focused on was trying to build a bigger and bigger case for rethinking how water was used in this basin, moving to other wildlife, birds and mammals, and ultimately to people in the system. So, as we scaled up, we looked at these tight relationships, not only of cranes to water but some of the more aquatic antelope that depend on water, and then, significantly, getting involved with social scientists, the economists are trying to quantify the economic relationships to that same water in terms of fisheries, agriculture, different resources that are river dependent, and prawns, in the case of Mozambique off the coast. So we were trying to solve this big puzzle, which was how had the water changed and what was the economic implication of that change and what could we do about it? Well, on top of all of that, an emerging picture was developing over the same period of time that the Zambezi itself was under a lot of threat. From climate change, we’ve done a lot of work on that basin as the worst, having the worst climate change among the major river basins of Africa. Some of the projections of runoff reduction are very dramatic, very concerning.

I’ve been involved in modeling work on that for a while, as well. Just looking on its impact on hydropower and water resources, it became very clear that not only were we dealing with a system that had been fundamentally changed by dams but was going to get worse in the future and water management was going to become even more critical issue in this basin. So, as I said, we started with wattled cranes, and we looked specifically at how you could restore, by getting more water into the system, the floodplain for wattled cranes, targeting their main food source and trying to understand how to get water back into the system for them. We did a lot of work. On that, a very dear friend of mine, Carlos Bento, did his master’s degree, he’s a Mozambican guy, did his master’s degree on this work. And we tried to pull that picture together of what the recovery value would be for wattled cranes from a change in water management that I’ll talk about. Then we started to scale up and look at not only other wildlife but different activities, and we started to see some interesting patterns. The people that were sort of agricultural economists said that the value of getting small floods back into this system, if they could be generated, was worth tens of millions in terms of agriculture along the lower Zambezi Basin in terms of waters that would flood riverbanks and floodplain areas that had been cropped that were now abandoned. So that got very interesting.

Then the fisheries people got involved and told us that with the restoration of a moderate flood back into the system, we were looking at 30,000 to 50,000 metric tons a year of restored fisheries, and this was the most important source of protein for people down in the coastal area. So, enormous value potential reflooding that area. And we even saw that the couple of years that we were working there when big floods actually happened because of very heavy, heavy rains in those years, people immediately came and the fisheries responded and there was a very direct response. So we could see that potential if we could get water back in more regularly. And some great work actually supported by the shrimp industries along the coast, which were still wild-caught shrimp industries. They were an alternative to those intensive shrimp farms that are developing, for example, in Thailand and the Philippines. They had a wild-caught shrimp industry completely dependent on natural flows in the Zambezi. And they said, hey, if you can get a more natural flood pulse back in that’s not so highly regulated by power production, we are looking at a gain of 10 to 20 million per annum just in coastal prawn or shrimp harvest in that system. And so they were very excited about this work as well.

And, as we pulled all these pieces together, we got a very interesting picture emerge, which is that if you take the economic value of all the different water-linked activities in the lower Zambezi without even putting an economic value on wildlife, just ignoring wildlife valuation, which can be done but it’s very difficult to do, if you just work on really market economic stuff, the total value of water use in the lower Zambezi was actually higher than the value of the hydropower being generated in the system, so that was pretty dramatic. Now, we were naive enough to think that they were going to take down these dams and change over to hydropower, but it did create and argument like this. Can hydropower be part of the story and not the only story in town? And that’s what we began to drive for, which was just a way of looking more holistically at this river. And then we began this very long odyssey, for more than 10 years, of working with these water engineers to try and normalize the idea of doing small flood pulses out of the system. It turns out that there is adequate water in the system. I’ll spare you about two chapters of my PhD on that. But there is adequate water in the system to actually generate floods down into this system with only about a 3% to 4% reduction in hydropower generation. If you do more significant reductions in hydropower, which were not really politically attainable, you saw even bigger gains, but we were able to put significant value on getting, on small reductions of hydropower and try to put that puzzle together. So that was very, very exciting to us and move into, like I said, a strong political stage of working with communities and authorities, and this was the former president of Mozambique.

We presented this work and tried to really create a new model for thinking about this river and to actually generate prescribed floods into this system by taking water that has spilled at the wrong time of year to empty out reservoir capacity and redirect that water to get spilled in the floodplain season, in the flooding season, when it was most needed for the river and for the delta system downstream, so a lot of our focus began in trying to retarget that water. So that’s been an exciting but still very ongoing story. You know, the fun part for me is it started with an exploration of cranes more than 20 years ago and kind of blossomed into people from many disciplines working together to try and build a case for water and rethink this water. And it’s certainly not to the point where it’s normalized as a practice in the Zambezi, but it is, we now have a system where, other than drought years, we’re getting water releases out of the dams, and we’re working more and more to push for water in even more critical seasons when it’s really needed downstream. So, it’s just an ongoing process of trying to just, to really rethink water in that basin for all the species and all the people that need it. One last story, we’ll go to a local story now, one that’s probably a little more familiar to some of you: the story of the whooping crane. The whooping crane is a great recovery story. And, actually, I’m glad you mentioned, Tom, sandhill cranes because sandhill cranes are also a great recovery story. I mean, they have recovered from incredibly low numbers to great numbers today.

But the whooping crane, even more dramatic. They were never abundant, the whooping crane. We don’t think there were ever the kind of huge numbers that we had of Canada geese or other big migratory water fowl, but they had a big range. Yeah, they had a big range across here, historically. And they, historically, wintered in a few different places. Down into Mexico here, along the coast of Texas, up to Louisiana, very significant, and then along the Ace Basin in parts of the coast of South Carolina and Georgia. Huge, huge and very unknown range up in the wilderness, really, of Canada migrating up through the middle of the US. So we knew that they were nesting out in wetlands in tall grass prairie but never abundant. Then came the period of intensive hunting that we know about that occurred at the turn of the century before last, back when we lost a lot of our egrets and a lot of our birds in the wild due to very intensive hunting.

Lost prairie chicks and of course, most famously, our passenger pigeons during that period. And whooping cranes were targeted in huge numbers, and they all but disappeared. And by 1941 there were 15 whooping cranes known in the wild. They had been hunted right about down to extinction. And the few that remained were down in Aransas National Wildlife Refuge in Texas. They could have, the ones that remained could have been in Mexico. They could have been anywhere along the coast over to Louisiana They could have been in the Ace Basin where they wintered, but they chose Aransas. Not a great choice, but we’ll talk about that, but an interesting challenge. So that’s where they ended up, and that is where they are GPSed, as we say, to go.

So these are birds that are programmed to go down and spend their winter in Texas, and that’s what they do. Not until 1954 was the nesting area of the birds even discovered up in Wood Buffalo, way, way up in northern Canada, and that’s because it’s an incredibly remote area. Really the birds are quite secure, other than maybe some very long-term possible scenarios with changing climate up in that region. By and large, they’re really pretty secure up in that area in this remote wilderness. But to get from there, where they are in the summer, to where they go down for the winter, they have a very long migration. They go through an incredibly long migration corridor of about 2,500 miles, including passing over, entirely passing over the tar sands area that’s up there, which is really Mordor, if you’re a “Lord of the Rings” fan. It’s really a very challenged area up there. They migrate over there, and they also have to navigate a lot of power lines on this very, very long migration that they do. They stop a little bit in Saskatchewan, Manitoba area, and then they come down through here.

They pass through the Platte River in Nebraska, and then eventually down to the coast of Texas where they winter. And they’re at beautiful Aransas National Wildlife Refuge where they’re well protected right now. I know some of you have been there, and it’s a beautiful, beautiful place, but it’s also a very, very challenging place to be any wildlife, and especially to be a very water- and land-dependent bird, coastal. This part of Texas is one of the most rapid developing areas of the country. I know that censuses over the last two 10-year censuses, they’ve added four congressional representatives in this area. That gives you some sense of the kind of growth that’s happening down there. And they’re very dependent on the waters that come out of the Guadalupe tide to Austin and to San Antonio and their water use. So the interesting thing about whooping cranes that make them somewhat unique compared to a lot of wintering birds is that they stay in pairs, in strong pairs on their wintering grounds. A lot of birds don’t.

And they stay very territorial on their wintering birds, and a lot of birds don’t do that. For example, a lot of our small songbirds will come up here to nest, but then go down and congregate in bigger numbers down, for example, in the Americas. And whooping cranes stay as pairs, and the reason they do that is they come down to Texas and they defend territories that are rich in blue crabs and they feed on these blue crabs. And blue crabs are triggered to come into these coastal marshes that the cranes depend on when you get freshwater inflows from the Guadalupe River or San Antonio River and they mix with the coastal saltwater and make this intermediate kind of brackish condition which is suitable to crabs, the crabs come in to breed in there, and then the cranes have this very tasty meal of blue crabs. And blue crabs are very tasty, and they come in and they feast on them and it’s about 80% to 90% of their diet down there, and then they also eat some mussels and other sea life. So it’s a really important food source for them, very tied to having adequate land to feed, to fish for these crabs, and then adequate water to come in and get that right salinity. And that same salinity also drives this coastal economy for Texas, and there’s a lot of advocates for freshwater on the coast that depend on sea life, seafood industries that are generated by those freshwater pulses that come into those marshes. Unfortunately, though, this is also, you know, a very, very intensively used part of the world. It’s one of the major petro chemical production areas of the country.

It’s where a lot of the pipelines that are being debated and coming down through the country ultimately end up with fuels down there. And one of the most bizarre things you can do down at Aransas, if anyone’s been down there, is you can look at these whooping cranes, these fragile recovering birds, and literally sort of look over the shoulder, look over the top of these birds and see huge barges of benzine floating down the river, all kind of in the same scene. It’s really an amazing landscape and all sort of encompassing all of the challenges of conservation. So, very big challenges down there. There’s nuclear power development in the area, and there is drought and there is what appears to be prolonged and increasing drought, likely due to shifting climates in this region, and tremendous water use demands from San Antonio, Victoria, and other basins. All of this really came to a head back in 2009, 2010, and 2011 when Texas had droughts that were so severe that they had to create a new category of drought just to name them. You’ll see this drought here, there used to be, you know, moderate, severe, and extreme drought. And then they had to come up with a whole new category of drought called exceptional because it went, you know, basically, as you heard in the news back then, beyond what they’d ever experienced. And this was the picture by 2011.

This new category of drought, exceptional drought, was encompassing the whole state and actually spilling into Oklahoma and New Mexico and other areas. So, really, really extreme drought experienced only on rare occasion in the last hundred years and beyond. And, as a result of that and result of water management decisions in the basin at that time, essentially no freshwater whatsoever came down to the coast. There was no food in the coast and whooping cranes started dying off, and we lost about 10, roughly 9% of the whooping crane population in the winter of 2009-2010, apparently due to lack of water and starvation combination down on the coast. About 23 birds disappeared from the population. And so this started the water wars of the coast that went on from there. We got involved in a lot of different actions to try to secure more water for the coast of Texas and try to find some balance in what is an extremely difficult situation to work in. And fundamentally, we knew that what the future of whooping cranes was about was the future of this coastal way of life. Was there going to be political will to continue to support water getting down to the coast of Texas or was it really going to be a new reality where this water was just going to all be, water story was going to be told in the upper part of the basin? And that’s really what we’ve been working for, for the last six, seven years down there, trying to secure enough land for whooping cranes to recover and enough water to nurture those lands and maintain this population and, in doing so, hopefully support the rich diversity of life that depends on these wetlands.

And we’ve been approaching this in many different ways, including getting very active on water politics, very involved in modeling land availability and trying to guide land purchases as we find willing sellers down in the area or conservation people willing to do conservation easements, and also trying to do a lot of in-classroom education about the value of these estuaries and the future of them in the area. So creating interactive games and models that are used down in the area to try and just raise awareness about the health of these systems and their need for water. So the future of whooping cranes really centers on that Aransas wintering population and its survival on its long migration. And our goal through the whooping crane recovery plan is to get to a thousand birds in the wild. There’s currently about 330 in the wild that have come up from those 15. So that’s good. That’s grown from 15 to 3– Let’s say hoping to hit 350 this year in about 60 years. So it’s no Canada geese story. It’s a slow, methodical recovery of gain some, lose some. But because of all those challenges with the birds in Texas and the unfortunate area where the birds ended up, we’ve also shifted a lot of attention to trying to establish a second self-sustaining population.

Actually, two self-sustaining populations, ultimately, independent of these Canada/Texas birds. And, really, you can think of it as an insurance policy. If, for example, the BP oil spill had occurred further up along the coast, that would have wiped out their breeding ground or their wintering ground area. If one of these big benzine marshes runs aground in the winter and spills throughout that area, the population of a lot of wildlife there is extremely vulnerable to those kind of changes. So the reintroductions that you are aware of probably here in Wisconsin are really a part of that insurance policy. So we formed this partnership back in 2000 called the Whooping Crane Eastern Partnership. It’s US Fish and Wildlife, it’s our state DNR, and it’s private initiatives, most notably ourselves, the International Crane Foundation, and Operation Migration, who flew the birds down for many years. That was the sort of core partnership that was formed here. And there were a lot of great successes in this project.

Really successful captive breeding programs were established at the International Crane Foundation, at Calgary Zoo, at Patuxent. I’ll address questions about Patuxent later– if you’ve heard those in the news– but they are undergoing big changes. But captive breeding of whoopers, very successful. That’s the starting point of all this. Forming whooping crane pairs in captivity and learning to teach, learning to raise chicks. Basically we developed a custom rearing and parent-rearing set of techniques to pair the birds for release. So we would hatch chicks in captivity and then raise those chicks with the parents to get them suitable, we hoped, to get back out in the wild. That part also has been very successful in trying to raise those birds. And we first set up shop in Necedah National Wildlife Refuge, as many of you know.

That was really the target to get the first hundred birds out into the wild and hopefully get them out and breeding. And they were reared and then methodically flown from Necedah National Wildlife Refuge all the way down to Florida on these beautiful ultralight flights. Some of you remember the first flight went down in 2000, was met by Jimmy Carter down in Georgia on its way down, flew down ultimately to a couple of national wildlife refugees, Chassahowitzka and St. Marks down in Florida. When the birds were first flown down with the ultralights, they had to stop every 30 miles. So I don’t know if anybody’s ever driven to Florida with small kids, it was kind of like that. Every 30 miles, stopping, stopping, stopping. They had to do this and they had to find suitable locations to overnight every 30 miles all the way to Florida. So, very painstaking. Well, the great part of the story is they did this, flew the birds all the way down, and then what did the birds do? They flew all the way back to Wisconsin that first following spring in three days.

Shot straight back up to Wisconsin, didn’t use any of the sites they were taught and were back up there three days later. So they had a mind of their own and a path of their own that had nothing to do with what they were taught on their way down, and then they were right back up into the region. And that’s happened year after year. So one of the interesting things about the flights is the initial cohort of birds was flown down each year, but then, from then on, after that one and only flight, they perpetually migrated back and forth and back and forth every year. It’s a pretty great story and year after year. And because of that, we’re able to do other innovative things, like just putting birds out with other birds that are already out and getting them migrating that way. So we developed a second technique called direct autumn, released to complement the Operation Migration flights and get even more birds out and get birds out on the landscape. And that was a big part of that story. And then, at the same time we started that second of the two populations I mentioned down at White Lake Marsh in Louisiana, which is an incredibly diverse water bird water, and also, if you remember from that map, actually one of the places whooping cranes could have ended up if they had been a little bit more east in their original survival of that final 15 that made it.

So it was a good site. So there’s release pens down there in Louisiana, and I can tell you more stories about that during questions later, if you like. But the birds are now, there’s now two populations that have been established, one up here in Wisconsin. It’s actually morphed a bit to the east, which I can explain, over time, but basically here in Wisconsin, and the other down in Louisiana. And what’s the story now of whooping crane recovery, we like to think? Patience! We’ve put more than 120 birds out on the landscape in Wisconsin. We yet to have a single chick that has fledged and made it to adulthood and had a chick of its own. And that is the holy grail of reintroduction. Getting the birds out in the wildlife, getting birds out in the wild, teaching them to pair, to form nice pairs, to migrate, to traverse these big distances, to safely select habitats, to do all that stuff. They’re doing that.

To form pairs, to have chicks lay eggs. They’re doing that. Then it’s the egg-to-chick to chick-growing-up-and-surviving story is the gauntlet that we are trying to get past now, and that’s been really the great challenge of whooping crane reintroduction. And we’ve tried many different things to try and get there. We have the curse of the black flies. We discovered the Necedah has this extraordinary population of avian specific black flies that sit on the eggs whenever the bird lifts up to kind of ruffle its feathers before laying back down. These flies swarm onto these eggs and then bit the bird from underneath while it’s on the eggs, essentially driving the birds crazy. So we had very high rate of nest abandonment of eggs. We had to overcome that by moving east toward Horicon and try and refocus at Horicon where, miraculously, there’s almost none of these flies.

Just the distance from Necedah to Horicon. There’s still black flies but they’re not these avian ones. So the things you learn on the fly as you do this work. The curse of poor predator avoidance, this is another one. The birds just do not seem to be able to teach their chicks adequately to avoid predators. We don’t know if it’s because there is sort of a super abundance of raccoons, opossums, you know, you name it, skunks, on the landscape today. Plenty of coyotes, it could be that, or it could be that something in that initial captive rearing of the birds to get them in the wild is just not giving them adequate predator avoidance skills, even though we work with predators with the birds to try and teach that avoidance. That could be part of the problem. And, as many of you have probably heard, we also have the curse of the shootings.

More than 10 of the birds we’ve been reintroduced– We’ve reintroduced into the wild have been shot. Actually, more than 20 all told, including some of the wild flock. And we’re trying to understand these. We’re trying to push for stronger sentencing for people who are caught and trying to reverse this sort of incomprehensible shooting of these big birds. All of it which is done by vandals. It’s not hunters shooting the birds. It’s bandits, people going out and doing it for kicks, basically. One person we’ve actually managed to get arrested for it and prison time. Most people, sometimes the fines are a buck.

So the fines have been all over the map for this but that’s clearly– So we’re in a holding pattern of patience. We’ve put the birds out. We’re still reintroducing birds in Louisiana. We have a fledged chick this year in Louisiana. So we’re excited that that bird will last and come up. But ultimately we have to solve these conservation challenges if we’re going to get this reintroduced population back on the landscape. And to me the fundamental issue is keep them wild in the first place. There’s nothing more difficult than doing reintroductions. And the best way to do reintroductions is by never having to do them in the first place and that’s by keeping things wild.

And that’s why we’re putting so much attention in Texas and really so much attention in everywhere in the world where you have populations that are under threat. It’s trying to keep these birds wild in the first place so we don’t have to go to these extreme measures of dressing up like puppets and flying them behind airplanes and teaching them how to get from across our landscape. So that’s really my take-home message. So, to me, you know, why do we all stay? Why has Triet been with us for so long? Why have I been with the Crane Foundation for so long? What keeps us? What keeps this crazy group of craniacs going all over the world that are doing this crane work? I think it’s really about the way they inspire us to solve big conservation challenges. Keeping cranes on the landscape is really about keeping our landscapes healthy. I think that’s very exciting and very motivating, and I do think that we’re working, you know, beyond cranes but for people and for the diversity of life on Earth. And I think that’s the crane story that I like to tell. I know many of you have been up to Baraboo. Please come visit us.

We are doing huge renovations in the next two years really aimed at telling these stories for each of the birds. So we’re going to be drawing out and doing bigger exhibits that really draw the cultural connections between the birds everywhere that we work around the world. I’m very excited about that, kind of telling these conservation stories more to our visitors. And for those who have experienced the Platte and the sandhills on the Platte or some of these global crane adventures, I can’t emphasize them enough. I think they’re just amazing. Ginny here went to Ethiopia with me and survived, barely, but we made it. [laughing] There are amazing crane places that we go around the world, and they lead us to wonderful places and great opportunities. So please join us. And thank you. Thanks for your time. [applause]