No More Minuets

Last week, the National Audubon Society's Robert Allen was starting an all-winter job: watching whooping cranes. At Aransas Wildlife Refuge, Texas, he would study their daily lives, their feeding habits, what made them happy or unhappy. He wanted to know everything about them, for the whoopers are on the edge of extinction. Fewer than 100 remain, and the flock is shrinking fast.

A hundred and twenty-five years ago, the whoopers, pure white with black wing tips and four feet tall, nested in the Middle West. Early settlers told of their "air circuses." Spreading seven-foot wings, they would dance in airborne minuets, circling, diving, lining up on sides. Their powerful whoops, from five-foot, trumpet-like windpipes coiled within their chests, could be heard three miles away.

But the whoopers, says the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, had too many strikes against them. They reproduced slowly. Their protracted lovemaking customs were a liability. During the breeding season they would gather in flocks on high knolls, parading, capering, bowing and prancing in careless ecstasy. While crane-boy was getting crane-girl, pioneers crept up with scatter-guns and mowed them down.

The once-gay whoopers learned to shun civilization. Whenever the white man's guns appeared, they fled deeper into the wilderness. Now their remnants breed in some unknown place in Canada's far north. This tactic of despair may be their final undoing: they are not Arctic birds, and are probably unsuited to far northern breeding grounds.

But the Wildlife Service and the Audubon Society have not lost hope. For two years they have studied the stately cranes intensively. If they learn enough about the whoopers, they may be able to coax them into favorable, protected refuges, where they may dance their courtship measures and multiply with impunity.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.