I probably wouldn’t have made the drive to Wheeler National Wildlife Refuge in North Alabama back in January if I hadn’t gotten an email bearing this subject line: “Whooping Cranes.”
The message came from Nicole Mashburn, a board member of the Wheeler Wildlife Refuge Association and the friend of a friend. Out of abject necessity, I ignore 90 percent of the emails I get, even emails from friends of friends, but put whooping cranes in the subject line, and you have me — hook, line, sinker and fishing net. “I thought you might like to know we have 18 whooping cranes this year,” Ms. Mashburn wrote.
I don’t keep a life list of birds I’ve seen, or go to any length to see rare birds, but the whooping crane is more than simply rare and more than simply beautiful. It’s a rare and beautiful bird that still exists because human beings decided a long time ago that it should exist.
Wheeler is a sprawling 35,000-acre sanctuary along the Tennessee River, and its wetland habitats offer ideal wintering grounds for migratory waterfowl of many types. It’s always worth the drive to Wheeler in winter because of the magnificent sandhill cranes that overwinter there every year. Gathering by the tens of thousands, they talk to one another continuously in a joyous burbling call that always makes me think an odd sort of marching band is tuning up, with instruments I don’t recognize.
But I’ve already seen the glorious flock of sandhills at Wheeler, and I was in the midst of an uncommonly busy winter. So I probably wouldn’t have made the trip again this year if not for Ms. Mashburn’s email about the whooping cranes.
Those majestic white birds are the tallest in America — each standing five feet tall, with a wingspan of nearly seven feet — and we almost lost them forever. Never known to exist in large numbers, whooping cranes were nonetheless geographically widespread in North America until farming and hunting pushed them to the brink of extinction. By 1941, the worldwide population of whooping cranes numbered barely more than 20.
