[RADIOLAB INTRO]

JAD ABUMRAD: Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT KRULWICH: I am Robert Krulwich.

JAD: This is Radiolab.

ROBERT: The podcast.

JAD: And today on the podcast, sort of kind of following in the footsteps of our Inheritance show, we have. It's a feel good story that you may not know how to feel about.

ROBERT: It's like a bad feel good story?

JAD: It's—I don't know.

ROBERT: Okay. I'm willing to be confused in my feelings if that's what it's gonna take.

JAD: [laughs] Yes. Let me get things rolling and introduce reporter Andrea Seabrook.

ANDREA SEABROOK: Hello.

JAD: Hey, how's it going?

JAD: She'll be telling us this next story.

ANDREA SEABROOK: Good. How are you?

JAD: I'm excited to hear what, what it is you've discovered on your adventures.

ANDREA SEABROOK: I have discovered many things, young grasshopper.

JAD: I'm ready.

ANDREA SEABROOK: Okay. So I went to this place which I sort of knew existed, but I thought it was just like a little place north of Washington.

ANDREA SEABROOK: US Department of Interior, US Geological Survey, Patokah Wildlife Research Center. There's a guard house.

ANDREA SEABROOK: You drive into this place and it's like driving—seriously, it's like driving out of the Beltway and into Jurassic Park.

ANDREA SEABROOK: They're just tall old growth trees.

ANDREA SEABROOK: It's suddenly sort of lush ...

ANDREA SEABROOK: And meadows and ...

ANDREA SEABROOK: And verdant. It's like a hidden magical forest. It really gives you a sense of what this place must have been like before we came in and sort of asphalted everything.

JAD: Now just to set things up a bit.

ROBERT: Okay.

JAD: Scientists in this place are basically trying to go backwards. They're trying to essentially re-evolve a species of bird that has lost its history.

ROBERT: Which bird is that?

ANDREA SEABROOK: Whooping cranes.

JAD: Whooping cranes.

ANDREA SEABROOK: Yes. Whooping cranes.

ROBERT: Oh, yeah. I know about that.

JAD: Yeah. This place has been written about a lot. There have been movies made about it. It's sort of the famous example of conservation. But when Andrea went to check it out, she discovered this mystery or this question that I never knew about that's right at the center of what these scientists are doing.

ANDREA SEABROOK: So I met this guy.

JOHN FRENCH: Hello, Andrea?

ANDREA SEABROOK: Yes. Hi!

ANDREA SEABROOK: Named John French.

*JOHN FRENCH: Come on in.

ANDREA SEABROOK:

He's got kind of a walrus-like mustache and straw hat. I don't know if that tells you anything else about him, but ...

JAD: Yeah, it does paint a picture.

JOHN FRENCH: Actually, I think we need to get you a little badge here.

ANDREA SEABROOK: This guy has been working with these cranes for, like, three decades.

JOHN FRENCH: Well, we're here at the whooping crane observatory.

ANDREA SEABROOK: And the first thing he does is take me to a duck blind.

JAD: What's a duck blind?

ANDREA SEABROOK: It's like a tiny little house up on stilts. It's raised off the ground.

ANDREA SEABROOK: We're walking up steps.

ANDREA SEABROOK: Steep steps, almost like a ladder. And you get inside this tiny little place with shutters that they can carefully and quietly open, and then look down on ...

ANDREA SEABROOK: The whooping crane pens.

ANDREA SEABROOK: ... these birds.

ANDREA SEABROOK: [whispers] Oh, my goodness gracious!

JOHN FRENCH: So this crane right in the corner of the pen there is the male. The female is sitting on a nest over there.

ANDREA SEABROOK: They are unbelievably beautiful and tall.

ANDREA SEABROOK: These are huge birds!

ANDREA SEABROOK: Three, four feet tall with fluffy, downy white bodies perched on top of these two long legs.

JOHN FRENCH: Come on, buddy. Stretch your wings here for us. Their wingspread is about eight, sometimes nine feet.

ANDREA SEABROOK: And then from the front of the body, this almost swan-like neck curves and rises up to a head that it's white all the way up. And it's got this bright blaze of red across the top of the head.

JOHN FRENCH: The red cap, that's actually bare skin. And that skin, when they come into breeding condition, I think, swells up, fills with blood, gets brighter.

ANDREA SEABROOK: I have never in my life seen anything like this. And here's why. By the 1930s, humans had destroyed enough of their territory and in fact, just, like, shot and eaten enough cranes that there were, they believed, 16 left in the wild.

JAD: 1-6?

ANDREA SEABROOK: 1-6.

JAD: Wow!

ANDREA SEABROOK: And you know how many breeding females were in that population? Four.

JAD: So they were right on the brink. They were right on the brink of the brink.

ANDREA SEABROOK: At that point, most biologists sort of say it's extinct.

ROBERT: Well, if you're that close to the end, then how do you bring an animal back from something like that?

ANDREA SEABROOK: Here's what they do. In one building, they have two cranes who just lay a bunch of eggs.

JOHN FRENCH: We can get, you know, three, four, five, sometimes even six or seven eggs from a single pair.

ANDREA SEABROOK: And the scientists gather those eggs.

JOHN FRENCH: [whispers] Walking into the hatchery now.

ANDREA SEABROOK: And they put them in these giant incubators.

JOHN FRENCH: [whispers] You can see the trays of eggs. They tilt back and forth to allow the eggs to rotate.

ANDREA SEABROOK: When they are about to hatch—and they can tell because they start hearing these little, like, tick, tick, tick, you know, sounds like knock, knock.

JOHN FRENCH: You know, a little hole appears. We take it across the room into the hatchabator. We'll walk in there next.

ANDREA SEABROOK: They take these eggs, put them in a room.

JAD: Okay.

ANDREA SEABROOK: And these eggs hatch, and the baby comes out and it thinks, "Who's my mother?" And then one of the walls of this room is plexiglass.

JOHN FRENCH: [whispers] And on the other side of the wall is an adult whooping crane.

JAD: Like a mother whooping crane?

ANDREA SEABROOK: Yeah.

JOHN FRENCH: [whispers] We call this an imprint model.

ANDREA SEABROOK: And so the baby can see a mother on the other side of the plexiglass. And in fact, the whooping crane on the other side of the plexiglass will make these sounds, these sort of sounds that say, "Come here, baby." You know, cute baby. And so the baby hears this sound and runs towards that sound, and, you know, bonk, runs into the plexiglass because, of course, that is there.

JAD: Oh, so they're not letting the baby get to the mom?

ANDREA SEABROOK: No.

JAD: Why not?

ANDREA SEABROOK: Because they don't have enough captive cranes to raise the number of eggs that they produce. And if a baby crane were to imprint on a mother crane that were we're gonna save, then it wouldn't migrate.

JAD: Ah.

ANDREA SEABROOK: They don't want the baby chick to inherit the traits that that mom has now that it's been raised by humans.

JAD: But they still somehow need the baby to see what a mom looks like.

ANDREA SEABROOK: Yes.

JOHN FRENCH: [whispers] We want to make sure that those young chicks know what they're supposed to be when they grow up.

ANDREA SEABROOK: So the—so the chick hears that sound. Bonk! So he looks around its pen, and in the corner is a fake whooping crane that the scientists have put there.

JOHN FRENCH: [whispers] We use stuffed carcasses from mute swans.

ANDREA SEABROOK: But they put a whooping crane head on the top.

JAD: That's kind of grim.

ANDREA SEABROOK: It's totally weird. And the way they've taxidermied these whooping cranes is to have the wings kind of ...

JOHN FRENCH: [whispers] Out a little bit, so the chicks can snuggle up under there and kind of get brooded by them. We have a heat lamp that is directed down so it's warmer in there.

ANDREA SEABROOK: So the chick snuggles up next to his fake mom, and the very next thing that happens is the humans walk into this environment.

SHARON PERRIGO: I'm Sharon Perrigo, and I'm a technician here.

ANDREA SEABROOK: Wearing these big, giant crane suits.

SHARON PERRIGO: Big white costume.

ANDREA SEABROOK: Is it made of a sheet?

SHARON PERRIGO: Just white fabric. We try to use that to conceal the human form.

ANDREA SEABROOK: And here's—here's a key part. They hold a crane puppet's head in one of their hands.

SHARON PERRIGO: We use a puppet to point at things like the adults would point out food on the ground, or guide them and walk with them. I mean, they have to be taught everything.

ANDREA SEABROOK: How to eat, how to swallow water.

JAD: They have to be taught how to drink?

ANDREA SEABROOK: She showed me how she takes the puppet head and dips it into water and then tips the head back.

SHARON PERRIGO: The parents teach them how to do that. So we have to use the puppets instead.

ANDREA SEABROOK: And in these giant bird suits and with the puppet heads, they lead each little chick outside for the first time.

SHARON PERRIGO: They're very curious, and they get very excited about going on walks and seeing butterflies and looking at bugs and see a pond for the first time and, you know, look at the frogs and try to catch the fish. And that's the fun part, to see them act like cranes.

ANDREA SEABROOK: And then they have to teach them something else that's really important but completely unnatural.

JOHN FRENCH: In the wild, a whooping crane pair lays usually two eggs.

ANDREA SEABROOK: One or both will hatch. And if two hatch, one of the babies will be stronger than the other, and the mother will start to ignore the weaker one, and that one will die.

JOHN FRENCH: One of those chicks dies.

ANDREA SEABROOK: The family is never more than three in the wild.

JAD: Really?

ANDREA SEABROOK: But these scientists, they raise a whole flock of them at once.

SHARON PERRIGO: And often the first time we walk two chicks together, they fight. There's a little bit of aggression.

ANDREA SEABROOK: Peck and run and ...

JAD: Oh, because I guess if you're a baby, you've evolved instincts to mistrust the other babies.

ANDREA SEABROOK: At least in the beginning of your life. And so the trainers have to teach these baby chicks to tolerate each other.

JOHN FRENCH: We then gather them together in a rather large group.

ANDREA SEABROOK: Then the scientists take them and put them on a track.

JOHN FRENCH: Little track, exactly.

ANDREA SEABROOK: Almost like a running track.

JAD: Hmm.

ANDREA SEABROOK: And they teach the baby chicks to go around and around and around the track, chasing a little propeller plane.

JAD: They chase a plane?

ANDREA SEABROOK: It's like a hang glider with a big fan on the back.

JOHN FRENCH: And then they get imprinted on the aircraft and the costumed handler that's driving the aircraft. So they kind of think of this as mom or dad, right? And so when they learn to fly, they fly behind the ultralight aircraft.

SHARON PERRIGO: That's very exciting. That's very—oh, you get all choked up. You know, it's just—we've done what we're supposed to do, and they're doing what they're supposed to do. And it's very rewarding, and you get all choked up about it. And they're just beautiful birds. They really are.

JOHN FRENCH: So they practice flying during the summer up in Wisconsin. They get stronger, their wings get bigger, they take longer and longer flights. And then when time for migration comes in late September or early October, the ultralight takes off, heads down toward Florida, and the birds follow them. So we fly them down there to a couple of refuges in western Florida. On the Gulf coast, and then we release them there.

ANDREA SEABROOK: And once the cranes have taken that journey once, they never have to be shown it again. So they, like, get it and they form breeding pairs.

JAD: Wow!

ANDREA SEABROOK: Down in the wild.

JAD: Now just to break in, think about how crazy this is. These birds were hatched in an incubator, cuddled by stuffed swans, raised by humans in bird costumes, then taught to eat and drink by puppets. Now they're flying behind an ultralight plane on a migration route that never existed in nature. And it seems to be working. There used to be 16 birds, now?

JOHN FRENCH: About 500, give or take. Depending on when we're counting and all that kind of stuff.

ROBERT: Wow!

ANDREA SEABROOK: It's a huge accomplishment. It's a huge accomplishment for this program, for ecological biology and for humanity that we could even figure out how to do something like this. You know, there have been all these documentaries that show these unbelievable, inspiring pictures of this light plane followed by these baby cranes. And it's so beautiful. And it's like, oh, you know, humans are doing what they should. You know, there are people who care so much that we're finally putting all of this into, you know, getting these cranes back and we're going to recover something.

JAD: Yeah.

ANDREA SEABROOK: But here's what—here's what happens next. French says that in most cases, the breeding pairs that are formed in the wild will lay eggs. They will sit on the eggs and do all the things that wild cranes are supposed to do. And then one day they get up and walk away.

JAD: Without the baby?

ANDREA SEABROOK: Without the egg ever hatching.

JOHN FRENCH: These birds seem to abandon their eggs before hatching for some reason. It's puzzling.

JAD: They just leave?

ANDREA SEABROOK: They just—they just walk away.

ANDREA SEABROOK: They just get up and walk away.

JOHN FRENCH: Yeah, right. Right.

JAD: That's—why?

ANDREA SEABROOK: Well ...

JOHN FRENCH: Well, we have a couple theories. What we see ...

ANDREA SEABROOK: John French says there are three big reasons it might be.

JOHN FRENCH: One is that these birds are bothered by black flies.

ANDREA SEABROOK: Flies?

JOHN FRENCH: Black flies. Yeah.

ANDREA SEABROOK: Black flies.

JOHN FRENCH: Black flies.

ANDREA SEABROOK: These are not houseflies.

JOHN FRENCH: They're not houseflies. They're biting flies. They burrow down under the feathers and bite and take a little blood meal.

JAD: These flies are infesting the places where they nest?

ANDREA SEABROOK: Yeah.

JOHN FRENCH: We have pictures of just the head of a crane just completely covered with black flies. We have done some experimentation though, to try and figure out if that is a cause. And the data looked pretty good. Like, yeah, when you knock down the black fly populations, the nesting success seemed to go up a little bit. But last year, the data were quite a bit less clear cut.

JAD: So they're not sure if it's the flies.

ANDREA SEABROOK: Exactly. That's one idea. The second idea is that maybe they aren't getting enough to eat.

JOHN FRENCH: Do they have enough food and the right kinds of food to get them through the incubation period? There's some kind of suggestive evidence that that might be a problem for them.

JAD: So they might be leaving their nests because they're just starving.

ANDREA SEABROOK: Yeah. Maybe because we've changed the landscape so much. But John French thinks the third possibility is really the most likely one.

JAD: Which is what?

JOHN FRENCH: The rather odd upbringing that these birds have in captivity.

ANDREA SEABROOK: He thinks they have so much baggage from such a screwy childhood.

JOHN FRENCH: They're raised by animal caretakers in these funky costumes. They're in a very small pen that has a stuffed swan. This is not normal. A normal childhood for a crane.

JAD: So he thinks it's something that they're doing or not doing.

ANDREA SEABROOK: Exactly.

ANDREA SEABROOK: So what exactly in that upbringing do you suspect might be the thing that is causing problems later when they're trying to be?

JOHN FRENCH: Yeah. The real answer is I have no idea.

ANDREA SEABROOK: So you don't even know what you're—what you're not teaching the chicks?

JOHN FRENCH: Absolutely. Right. Right.

ANDREA SEABROOK: This is perhaps the most difficult problem. There are so many variables. It could be that the birds aren't being kept warm enough, or they're being kept too warm. Maybe they didn't have a role model for how long they get parented and so they just walk away. And ...

JAD: Oh, so it could be a timing thing, like ...

ANDREA SEABROOK: Yeah.

JAD: ... a mother needs to say, "You need to sit on your egg for six days, not five."

ANDREA SEABROOK: No, just don't walk away. No, don't do that. [laughs]

JAD: But they always walk away.

ANDREA SEABROOK: Actually, no. There are two or three. After 11 years, there are two to three adult birds in the migratory flock.

JAD: Who are hatched in the wild?

ANDREA SEABROOK: Who were hatched in the wild from captive bred birds. The rest of them were born here that are in that flock now.

JAD: Does that mean that countless little babies have died because their mothers have abandoned them?

ANDREA SEABROOK: Yes.

JAD: Oh, that's tragic.

ANDREA SEABROOK: And get this: every single one of those birds, once they release them and get them down there, is worth about $100,000.

JAD: Really?

ANDREA SEABROOK: Yeah.

JAD: In terms of the money that's been put in for training and all that?

ANDREA SEABROOK: Yeah.

JAD: Oh, my God.

ROBERT: So not as a collectible, but in terms of investment.

JAD: [laughs] You are a sick man.

ROBERT: No, no, because, like, if you're a really rare animal, like a crane, just being rare makes you valuable in some market or other.

ANDREA SEABROOK: In this case, it's sort of like your child is worth, you know, by the time they go to college, you've spent $900,000 on them. Well, by the time these birds go to college, their human parents have spent $100,000 on them.

ROBERT: Yeah.

ANDREA SEABROOK: But here's something you're not thinking of and I haven't said.

ROBERT: Okay.

ANDREA SEABROOK: And that is these are very long-lived birds. They can live to be 40, and right now we're just seeing the first results of just the—you know, the success that they've had. And so now they're just getting to this part in the story.

JAD: I see. So the three birds, the three little babies who have hatched out there, put against a 40-year lifespan means, well, maybe in a few years they'll get better.

ROBERT: How do we know we're having a real crisis as opposed to a learning curve crisis?

ANDREA SEABROOK: We don't.

JAD: That's interesting.

ANDREA SEABROOK: He thinks—and you can hear it in his voice, he thinks they should have gotten better at it by now.

JOHN FRENCH: Yeah, I mean, there's something more that we need to do to help that population become self sustaining.

ANDREA SEABROOK: There's something else wrong.

ROBERT: So it feels to him in a very gut sort of way that they're not behaving quite right.

ANDREA SEABROOK: Yeah.

ROBERT: Not because they haven't learned how, just they may never learn how. It may be something broken in them.

ANDREA SEABROOK: It really bothers him too.

ANDREA SEABROOK: So given all of this, it just seems it's just massively complicated. Why do you—why do we do it? Why do we humans do—why are we doing this?

JOHN FRENCH: Well, it's the right thing to do. And well, what else are you gonna do? I mean, we're not gonna give up. We're gonna find a way to make it work a little better and then go have a couple beers. [laughs]

ANDREA SEABROOK: I mean, I went into this thinking this is like the coolest thing ever, and how noble. And I came out of it really ambivalent, actually, which is totally counter my type. It is an important undertaking for it itself, but re-establishing a fully independent flock, I think may be a goal that is too hard.

JAD: But what about a flock that's not fully independent? I mean, if you abandon the usual idea of conservation, which is that you're trying to go back to the way things were before we screwed everything up, and you just say this is a new species and maybe they need humans as parents. That's just the way it's gonna work.

ANDREA SEABROOK: Yeah.

ROBERT: I find that sad.

ANDREA SEABROOK: It's funny because in a sense, when they fail reproductively, you fail reproductively.

JOHN FRENCH: [laughs] Well, I don't know about that. Reproductively. Yeah, possibly. I still have a couple daughters, and they're gonna be there whether the cranes are there or not, I hope.

ANDREA SEABROOK: [laughs]

JAD: But I guess with these cranes, whatever happens, we're not gonna know for a while.

ANDREA SEABROOK: Yeah.

JOHN FRENCH: It's gonna take a heck of a long time, so, you know, dozens and dozens of years.

ANDREA SEABROOK: Okay, let's get in the car. It's freezing out here. You want to sit in the front seat?

JAD: A very sincere thanks to Andrea Seabrook for lending us her amazing talents. Andrea spent more than a decade covering Congress for NPR, and she just left to start a new podcast, which she kickstarted and is now kicking ass. I would encourage everyone listening to check it out. It's at DecodeDC.com. DecodeDC.com. Thanks also to Nadia Wilson for production help and to the folks at the Patokah Wildlife Research center for being so generous with access.

ROBERT: Thank you, Operation Migration people.

JAD: Thank you, cranes.

ROBERT: Caw caw!

JAD: Caw caw!

[LISTENER: Hey there. My name is Greg Fitzpatrick, and I'm sitting next to a campfire under a canopy of stars deep in the heart of Texas. Radiolab is supported in part by the National Science Foundation and by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www.sloan.org. Thanks.]

 

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