The DECISIONJanuary 23, 2016 Sataday
End of Ultralight-guided Migration
Jan. 23, 2016 Joe Duff - That?s all she wrote.
The decision was final. There will be no more aircraft led releases.
There are a number of inhibitors to a successful reintroduction of Whooping cranes. Firstly, you need a method of teaching them migration. Then you must get enough of them onto the landscape so a high percentage will survive to reach breeding age. You must ensure they exhibit wild behavior and mate with their own kind.
Operation Migration team has been very successful in achieving those goals.
Despite those achievements, you can only judge the success of a wildlife reintroduction by the ability for the population to produce young and grow to a self-sustaining level. Of the 240 plus birds released into the EMP, only 10 chicks have survived to fledge.
So why are the offspring not surviving?
Why did so many eggs hatch in 2015 but only 3 chicks survive? Maybe predation played a role but the more likely cause is inattentiveness of the parents. Maybe in their early development, hand raised chicks miss some behavior that only real parents can teach.
When animals are raised in captivity for multiple generations they undergo genetic changes that may weaken their ability to persist in the wild. They live on a fixed diet, they don?t fly and they are not subjected to the regular adrenalin rush of avoiding predators. With so few Whooping cranes left, each one is precious and vet teams treat them for conditions that would normally kill untreated birds in the wild. They live on to produce children with the same predisposition for that illness.
Last August we hired Jeff Fox who has been reading research papers and using the WCEP database to see how the UL method stands up against other techniques. Unfortunately, the more he dug, the more discrepancies he found in that database.
There are more males than females.
http://operationmigration.org/InTheField/2016/01/23/end-of-ultralight-guided-migrationhttp://operationmigration.org/InTheFieldcrane cam is LIVE - but too dark for a pic
http://www.ustream.tv/channel/migratingcranes/pop-out
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Topic: Whooping Cranes, Operation Migration (Read 113489 times)