The May 5 shooting took out one of the rarest birds on the planet – only a few hundred whooping cranes are left in the wild.Nelson Jeffkins/Supplied
When Nelson Jeffkins found the dead bird near his home on Barrie Island in Northern Ontario, scavengers had already begun to gnaw at its corpse. He recovered a GPS locator and metal tags attached to the long, slender legs, and reported the death to authorities. Soon, federal wildlife enforcement officers were combing the scene for shell casings or feathers, anything to help them understand who shot the female whooping crane known as 39-17.
“We felt that because of the gravity of the offence, it would be best handed over to us,” said André Lupert, Ontario acting regional director for the Wildlife Enforcement Directorate. “We’re going to put a lot of effort into it.”
The May 5 shooting took out one of the rarest birds on the planet – only a few hundred whooping cranes are left in the wild. The killer, if found and convicted, could face six months in jail and up to $300,000 in fines. But to conservationists, the loss is immeasurable and a setback to a decades-long effort to bring the species back from the brink of extinction.
Standing five feet high, with a two-metre wingspan, whooping cranes are the tallest birds in North America. In the 1940s, the population was decimated by loss of wetland habitat and over-hunting. Only 15 were left, and all of them lived in a wildlife refuge in Alberta until conservationists began collecting their eggs in an attempt to start other populations elsewhere.
It costs nearly $100,000 to put one whooping crane into the wild, according to the conservation group the International Crane Foundation (ICF). The investment isn’t just financial: Raising whooping cranes is difficult. The birds can’t have human contact, said Anne Lacy, crane research co-ordinator at the ICF. So biologists dress up as cranes to raise the chicks, who are prone to imprinting on the first parental-figure they see.
The crane costume the biologists wear for every interaction is a white, full-body suit with a bird head puppet on one hand.
Whooping cranes migrate, flying hundreds of kilometres every fall. But the birds raised in captivity didn’t have parents to teach them the route. So the humans taught them to follow ultralight aircraft to learn their migration routes, which span more than 1,500 kilometres.
In the 1990s, Bill Lishman and Joe Duff, two conservationists and ultralight plane pilots, founded Operation Migration after the ICF asked them to join the whooping crane effort.
After months of earning the birds’ trust and getting them used to the whir of the planes’ engines, they brought the cranes on their first human-guided migration.
Mr. Duff – in full crane costume – would fly several dozen kilometres at a time with the birds coasting in formation on the plane’s wake. The migration from Wisconsin – where the birds lived in the summer – to Florida took several months.
“It was just an incredible thing to be a part of,” he said. “I was actually a bird. … And then when you got a chance to take off and fly with them – it’s just indescribable.”
For 14 years, Mr. Duff took a new generation of birds south every fall. They would find their way back on their own.
Today, there are about 800 wild whooping cranes, according to the ICF. The population Mr. Duff helped establish now includes just under 100 birds. The female crane killed on Barrie Island was part of that flock.
She was born in captivity in Maryland, released into the wild in Wisconsin and was still testing out her wings when she died at the age of 2, Ms. Lacy said.
In 2019, she flew to Michigan before flying across Lake Huron to Barrie Island, an unusual journey for a whooping crane – they don’t usually fly over open water.
Her arrival in Ontario excited Terry Land, a bird watcher who kept to himself the news that a rare whooping crane was in the area.
“That sort of phenomenon in Ontario would have attracted a lot of attention, which would not have been good for the bird,” he said.
He photographed her days before she died.
She stayed in the fields around Mr. Jeffkin’s house. He knew the bird was special, but wasn’t aware how special until later. He heard two gunshots the night she was killed and looked outside to see her walk across his pasture and lie down. He found her dead the next morning.
A $3,000 reward is being offered on behalf of the ICF and other organizations for any information that leads to the arrest of a suspect, but conservationists note that you can’t put a price on a whooping crane.
“You really get to know these birds personally," Ms. Lacy said. “It’s just so phenomenally frustrating because the amount of effort it took just to put that one bird on the landscape … that’s wasted just because somebody decided to point a gun at this target and shoot.”