When I worked on the whooping crane project, I met a great person named Eva Szyszkoski. She was a DAR intern with me, and together we helped raise 11 whooping crane chicks. We both loved our cranes so much, we wanted to stay on the project, and became full time crane trackers. When I left in August of 2008, Eva took over my position, and is still working for the International Crane Foundation (going on 3 years!). Given the difficulties of the project, this is an impressive feat and deserves an award. Eva periodically writes updates for the ICF website. Here is one she recently wrote about doing health checks on the juvenile cranes that will be wintering at St. Marks this winter. She talks about the cranes reactions to the health checks, in addition to some of the difficulties associated with this wintering site, including muddy access roads and feral pigs.
St. Marks NWR Health Checks – Ten Down, Ten To Go
By Eva Szyszkoski
The ten St. Marks birds have their permanent leg wear! Cranes #'s 6-09, 8-09, 10-09, 11-09, 12-09, 14-09, 15-09, 18-09, 25-09 and 26-09 arrived at their wintering location in Wakulla County, Florida on January 13th, a whopping 82 days after leaving the Necedah National Wildlife Refuge in central Wisconsin behind their surrogate ultralight parents.
Once the new batch of juvenile cranes arrive at their wintering location, whether it is the St. Marks National Wildlife Refuge in Florida's panhandle or the Chassahowitzka National Wildlife Refuge in western central Florida, they receive a final health check and their permanent transmitters, unique leg band color combinations and a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service metal band. The entire tracking team is involved in the banding process. The leg bands and transmitters are attached by Dr. Richard Urbanek of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Senior Project Biologist and Tracking Team Co-Leader. Our other Tracking Team Co-Leader, Sara Zimorski of the International Crane Foundation, is one of the bird handlers, and myself and our new intern Matt Strausser are the 'glue people,' holding the glue and double checking the bands while the birds were being banded.
On the morning of the 15th, the four of us piled into one of our tracking vehicles with costumes and banding equipment and headed up the west coast. We do not take care of the birds that winter at St. Marks, but rather care for and watch the birds that will eventually winter at Chassahowitzka. We were met at the maintenance shop by Disney World's veterinary staff, led by Dr. Scott Terrell who would be preforming the heath checks on the chicks while they were in hand, local veterinarian Dr. Norm Griggs, Brooke Pennypacker of Operation Migration, currently the only full time caretaker of the St. Marks group, and Scott Tidmus, Disney employee and temporary volunteer. Once assembled, we headed out to the pen site, close to a half and hour away from the living quarters of the Brooke and Scott T., through two miles of bumpy, closed refuge roads with one section that I would be wary to drive on if heavy rains occurred, already riddled with deep tracks and slightly muddy.
Since the ground around the pen was mostly mucky mud, the shelter for heath checks had been set up around the chicks food shelter, inside the open-topped pen and a very short distance away from the chicks themselves in their temporary top-netted pen. They must have been slightly awed at the sight of 10-plus costumed people tromping through the mud single file to the enclosed shelter. Once in the shelter and out of sight of the birds, costumes could come off and work promptly got underway. Sara and Brian Clauss of the U.S. Geological Survey and Patuxent Wildlife Research Center employee were our two bird handlers, and there were almost always two hooded chicks being worked on simultaneously, one getting it's bands and transmitter, and one getting it's health check. Things progressed fairly quickly and we completed all ten birds in two and a half hours. Two of the chicks received PTT or satellite transmitters in addition to their VHF transmitters so these birds were held slightly longer to ensure that the glue had set enough and the transmitters would not fall off. A couple of the chicks amused themselves by biting their handlers costume and taking jabs at anything they could, clearly unhappy at the kind of extra attention they were receiving.
We packed up and headed back to the blind, taking a moment to observe the feral pig that had wandering to within 40 yards of the pen and was completely ignoring us as we passed by on the path, probably 50 feet away. We loaded up our stuff into our vehicles and headed back to the maintenance area of the refuge where we said our goodbyes and drove back down to our living area near Chassahowitzka. We expect our ten birds to arrive sometime next week, and are looking forward to taking care of chicks of our own!
Thanks to everybody involved in health check and banding.
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