GAUTIER, Miss. (AP) — Dressed in white canvas
bags, their faces hidden behind a double layer of heavy black plastic mesh, the
biologists turned avian foster parents spoke in hushed voices.
"We don't want to spook the cranes,"
whispered Megan
Savoie, crane project director at the Audubon
Species Survival Center.
Her concern was for a quartet of 6-month-old
birds destined for theMississippi
Sandhill Crane National Wildlife Refuge in Gautier — not for the
dozens of adult Mississippi sandhill cranes calling to each other in creaky
rattles on New Orleans' west bank.
While the four juveniles raised in Louisiana
were heading toward the Mississippi Gulf Coast, so were two more raised in
Florida.
But before they could be moved, they had to be
caught.
The 4 ½-foot-tall cranes are gray with red
foreheads. Only about 150 exist — about one-third as many as whooping cranes.
They were among the first animals on the U.S. endangered species list, and
their 19,300-acre refuge was the first created under the Endangered Species Act
of 1973.
If not for Savoie and other biologists in New
Orleans, Florida and Maryland, the refuge would be lacking. More than 95
percent of the 100 birds there either were raised in captivity or are
descendants of such birds, said Scott
Hereford, top wildlife biologist at the refuge.
Audubon hatched eight this year. Two died within
days of unknown causes and one died of West Nile virus complications shortly
before it was old enough to fly. Another was eaten by a rat snake. Those snakes
have become a problem for Audubon's cranes. They'll eat either chicks or eggs —
even decoy eggs used to get cranes to keep laying. Several had to have dummy
eggs surgically removed, Savoie said.
Snakes are just the latest challenge at the
center, which has raised 150 chicks to flying age since breeding birds were moved
there in 1995 from Patuxent, Md. Audubon has 40 adult birds, and the White
Oak Conservation Center north of Jacksonville, Fla., has 10.
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