When my dad was fighting in WWII, whooping cranes numbered fewer than two dozen and their outlook seemed dismal. In 1972, when 15-year-old Carol thought she might become a forest ranger, there were fewer than 100 wild whooping cranes migrating over Saskatchewan. By 1992, I was living in Calgary, spending my days accounting and evenings volunteering on the Calgary Zoo’s board of directors. That year the zoo joined the struggle to boost crane populations, launching a captive breeding program with birds being released into a new eastern migratory flock and non-migratory flocks in Florida and Louisiana. As I switched careers to ecotourism planning and then travel writing, cranes were being bred and released into the wild.

I’d seen captive whoopers but I wanted proof that the Calgary Zoological Society’s conservation efforts and that of other organizations and people mattered. Maybe I wanted proof that my evenings pursuing bylaws and budgets made a difference. The International Crane Foundation numbered wild whooping cranes at 667 last year. Many people see them in Texas each winter but I dreamt of seeing them in Saskatchewan, where my passion for wildlife was ignited many decades ago.

Saskatchewan has plenty of flat, wide open spaces but it’s still hard to find the only self-sustaining flock of whooping cranes spread over a province almost as large as Texas. I’d been monitoring eBird, the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s database of citizen bird sightings, but there weren’t many people recording whooping crane observations and those that did seemed to add them days after birds were spotted.

So, even though I grew up in the wedge-shaped province, I decide to tip the odds of a crane sighting in my favour by hiring a local expert. We meet Shadick, our avian advisor, after sunrise and follow him in search of the cranes. Shadick, a retired astronomy professor, has a knack for spotting unusual things a long ways away. 

Scientists believe whooping cranes were always uncommon. Saskatchewan boasts plenty of ideal breeding habitat for the birds, but their innate shyness has made it extremely difficult for them to adapt to human presence. Fortunately, according to Shadick, the birds are showing up more often in the prairie province. “I saw my first whooping cranes in 1972 when there was a pair near Blackstrap [Provincial Park]. I had looked for them unsuccessfully for many years before,” he recalls. “A decade ago we saw 39 birds but in 2015 there was a significant increase in the number of birds seen in the area north of Saskatoon. A flock reached a maximum count of 154 in 2018.”

After finding our first birds, Shadick leads our tiny convoy past a leafless tree, slowing as a bald eagle lifts off, then winding past tidy farms to a large field. I spot a tall bird with a snowy feather bustle, then another and another. A mated pair, their necks extended straight ahead and their legs straight back, float past. Their long legs drop like a plane’s landing gear as they settle on the stubble. We slowly open our doors and set up cameras and spotting scopes.

“Two, four, six, eight,” I count, my accountant’s brain giddy at the flock I see stretching across the field. “I think there’s at least 50!”

Shadick, huddled over his scope, does his own census: “I count 60. And three colts (juvenile cranes),” he declares, lifting his head as a cacophony of harsh bugling fills the air. In a single farmer’s field, we’ve found more than 10 per cent of the Wood Buffalo flock (counted at 506 in the winter of 2019-2020)!

Shivers run up my back as I focus on a caramel-coloured colt ambling between two adults, their stilt-like legs striding in unison. It took months for these birds to pick a life-long mate, and usually only one egg laid each year yields successful offspring. Now this pair are showing junior the migration route, their travel plans unchanged by border restrictions — although they are not unaffected by world events. In 2017, the Trump administration reduced funding to the Patuxent Wildlife Research Center and eight birds with important genetics were transferred to the Calgary Zoo for their breeding program.