baz - The more I read up on this the more it's looking like a done deal.
The U.S. and Canadian wildlife services provide 50% of the funding for this project, by law and a Memorandum of Understanding between the U.S. and Canada, and are in partnership with many other entities for the remaining funds. This includes, of course, Operation Migration and their donors.
The Whooping Crane Eastern Partnership (WCEP) is, again, by law, an experiment. The FWS is required by law (there's a theme here that's stacked against OM) under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) to evaluate the effectiveness of the Service's programs it is tasked with creating and managing. According to the Service's Vision Document, this experiment is costly and is not and will not meet the criteria established for the Eastern Migratory Population (EMP) reintroduction. Here's that citation:
"The recovery plan?s objective requires that any additional population be self-sustaining. To quantify this, WCEP adopted a persistence-based criterion for the EMP. That is, when in the absence of additional releases, the EMP has an acceptably small probability of going extinct over a mutually-acceptable timeframe (e.g., 50-100 years). Although the details of this criterion
have not yet been fully defined, the EMP clearly falls short of this criterion. Recent population models, conducted as part of the 2014 WCEP Structured Decision Making Process, predicted that, the EMP will be declining or extinct under all evaluated scenarios within 75 years. It appears that, without substantive changes, the EMP is unlikely to meet the Objective."
So, FWS has to look at alternatives, which is what the Vision Document and the regulatory process is all about. What's not said is the presumed pressure being put upon FWS from Canada and its other partners, along with the national budgetary pressures.
The good thing about this whole process is that the entire focus is on the survival of the whooping crane. And it sure sounds like that's going to include well-established protocols in the future that have been successful in the reintroduction of birds like the California condor and peregrine falcon.
Here's a fact sheet on the WCEP as well as the Vision Document itself.
http://www.fws.gov/midwest/whoopingcrane/wcraneqanda.htmlhttp://www.fws.gov/midwest/whoopingcrane/pdf/FWS5YrVisionDoc09222015.pdf
