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Will a Canadian national park be the salvation of Whooping Cranes?/USFWS

It’s a safe bet that not too many travelers reading this post have visited Canada’s Wood Buffalo National Park. It’s Canada’s largest park and one of the largest national parks in the world at nearly five times the area of Yellowstone, but to say it’s a 30-hour drive northeast of Seattle is an understatement of its remoteness.

Wood Buffalo, spanning the border of Alberta and the Northwest Territories, was created, as its name suggests, to protect the remnants of the Wood Bison subspecies of the American Bison. About 5,000 of the wild bison roam the park, but birders and ornithologists are more interested in the feathered – and far less numerous – summer residents at Wood Buffalo. The last of the original population of Whooping Cranes breed in the national park.

It’s not likely that Whooping Cranes were ever a numerous species, with numbers in the low tens-of-thousands before European settlement. In the 19th century, it’s been estimated that fewer than 2,000 migrated from northern Alberta to the Gulf Coast of Texas. By 1941 that number had dropped by nearly 99 percent to only 21 wild birds as wintering and migratory habitat was developed and destroyed. Recovery efforts have brought the population that summers in Wood Buffalo back to 310. That’s a frighteningly low number, but significantly better than 21.

Whooping Cranes are in the news this week because of the other half of the more than 600 that exist in the world today. After efforts to introduce non-migratory whoopers in Florida in the early 1990s, an attempt to reintroduce a second migratory population was launched in 1999, with the breeding grounds in central Wisconsin. The Whooping Crane Eastern Partnership and Operation Migration project used ultralight aircraft to guide the cranes to Florida every fall. Teaching the birds to migrate has been successful, but efforts to get them to successfully raise young on the breeding grounds have had disappointing results.

The upshot of passionate political and scientific debate beyond our scope here is that the ultralight project has officially been terminated. That leaves a few non-migratory cranes in Florida, a couple dozen in Louisiana, and about a hundred migrating on their own from Wisconsin to Florida. (Another 165 or so are in captivity.) What becomes of those populations now remains to be seen.

That brings us back to Wood Buffalo and what is again the last best hope of Whooping Cranes as a species. Their story has remarkable parallels to that of the California Condor. The condor population dwindled to 27 individuals before the drastic measure of capturing the entire wild population was taken in 1987. Today, many of the several hundred condors once again living and breeding in the wild call a national park home. Grand Canyon National Park's South Rim is one of the easiest places in the world to spot one.

Where do Whooping Cranes and California Condors go from here? Thanks to a number of at least partially successful recovery and conservation efforts, extinction has gone from an imminent threat to merely a looming danger. That doesn’t sound like cause for great celebration, but anyone involved in condor or crane recovery in 1987 or 1941 would have been overjoyed to hear where the respective species are in 2016.

It takes a village to save a bird. A village and a couple of national parks that are primarily there to preserve some stunning scenery and a herd of bison.