Jane Goodall, Jimmy Carter Speak Out Against Crane Hunting

An August 13, 2013 story in the Tennessee Tribune had an arresting headline: My jaw dropped when I read it. 

Jane Goodall and Jimmy Carter Join Advocates in Opposing Crane Hunting

Photo by Cynthia Routledge

Whoo! This is BIG. 

It's one thing for someone like me to make a fuss about crane hunting. But when a former president and the world's most eminent primatologist/conservationist speak out, people sit up and listen.

And yet, it makes so much sense that Dr. Goodall and President Carter would oppose a crane hunt. 

Tennessee is the midpoint in the migratory path of eastern whooping cranes from Wisconsin to Florida, and is one of the best places to see these towering, critically endangered white birds. 

President Carter wrote a letter to the Tennessee Fish and Wildlife Commission, saying: 

“I am an avid hunter of quail, dove, turkey, geese, ducks, and other game fowl, but have for years been a strong vocal and financial supporter of the effort to protect Whooping Cranes and to reestablish the flock that flies over our farm in southwestern Georgia – and also over parts of Tennessee. I understand that your commission is contemplating opening hunting for Sandhill Cranes in Tennessee, and it is obvious that this will make it highly likely that Whooping Cranes might also be killed.”

Why not shoot the mottled one? It's a little different...

Juvenile whooping crane feeding with sandhills. Photo by Cynthia Routledge

To me, the voice of an avid hunter, coming out against hunting sandhill cranes, carries even more weight than that of an average citizen. When he's a former president who happens to be a birder and conservationist, it would behoove TFWC to listen hard.


A full 62% of Tennesseans oppose hunting sandhill cranes. Why, then, would TFWC try to push this unpopular hunt through, the way Kentucky did? I've made the point in past blogposts that sandhill cranes are worth infinitely more alive than dead. Just ask the director of the Lillian Annette Rowe Sanctuary on Nebraska's Platte River, where sandhill crane tourism brings 15,000 visitors from all 50 states and 46 foreign countries; brings more than $10 million into the local economy of Kearney, Nebraska every year. All without firing a single shot. 

A typical roost gathering, as viewed from a blind. Photo by Cynthia Routledge.

Jane Goodall wrote this in a letter to TFWC:

“For many, cranes are symbols of peace, a message they carry around the world. The idea that these birds could be hunted for sport is distressing to me, and would be to many others...It is clear that the Sandhills foraging and roosting in freedom during their stay in Tennessee, attracting visitors to view them and other local species, offer a good deal more all round than if hunters are permitted to kill them.”

It feels good to know that Jane Goodall and Jimmy Carter are behind those of us who think a sandhill crane hunt is at best ill-advised and at worst obscene. This isn't about controlling crane populations. It's more about putting something new and different on Tennessee's menu of shootable wildlife. Well, the majority of Tennesseans, and a lot of hunters, think sandhill cranes make very poor game birds. If just 39% of nests raise just one colt per year, a pressing need for population control is hardly the driving force behind this hunt. 

photo courtesy International Crane Foundation

In fact, population growth has stopped in seven out of eight Wisconsin nesting areas, and crane nesting success is extremely poor in marginal habitats. High nest predation (cranes are ground nesters, vulnerable to coyotes, raccoons and foxes ) and high juvenile mortality take care of most cranes before they ever get a chance to grow up and make the flight south with their parents.

photo courtesy International Crane Foundation

 And TFWC is proposing to let people shoot into those tight-knit family groups, shattering longstanding pair bonds and making orphans of inexperienced crane colts.

Share this post; email, call or write TFWC; show up at the meeting in Knoxville on August 22 and 23, 2013; voice your opposition. Yes, the "official" deadline for comments has come and gone, but that doesn't stop us from making our concerns known. Here are some contacts:

Governor Bill Haslam
State Capitol
Nashville, TN 37243
Business: (615) 741-2001 
Email: Bill.haslam@tn.gov

Ed Carter, TWRA Director Ellington Agricultural Ctr.

PO Box 40747

Nashville, TN 37207
  615-781-6552 Email:ed.carter@tn.gov 

  

Dr. Jeff McMillin (2012-2017), TFWC Chairman  (Statewide)
 1705 Edgemont Avenue
Bristol, TN 37620-4307


jeff.mcmillin@tn.gov

(423) 968-1933 

Thanks to Cyndi Routledge for her invaluable help with this fight and this post.

Rarities

In North Dakota, I always see some things I've never seen before, and some things that are hard to see anywhere else. Nestled in the grass near where we saw both the displaying Sprague's pipit and the Baird's sparrow was a butterfly I was sure I'd never seen. One of the things I love about carring my camera everywhere is that I don't have to frantically scribble down obscure underwing markings and antenna knob color in my notebook. I just try to get the best picture I can and go about my merry way, keying it out when I get to a field guide. This is a Chryxus Arctic, Oeneis chryxus. I'm not sure I've ever seen an Arctic before, much less this one. Eastern birders count the American bittern among the rarest of the rare, but in North Dakota it's possible to see them both standing in the reeds by the roadside and in flight. If you look closely at these photos you can see the bittern's impossibly long green toes sticking out behind its tail. They're kind of Gollumesque birds. This one was being perforated by a red-winged blackbird as it made its way toward a slough.

Something you don't see very much in the East: a bull, walking down a country road toward a battery of birders.
He was much more interested in some heifers penned in the grove, and turned off before I had to get out my red cape and tri-cornered hat. Tracks showed that he'd been wandering up and down the road for quite some time.

Abandoned houses are increasingly rare where we live, thanks to people's propensity for simply knocking or burning them down. I love abandoned houses, love to poke around in them and look for signs of the lives they once sheltered. Bill of the Birds is very spooky but he ventured a peek in this one. He has his neck warmer pulled up as a kind of stovepipe hat; it was that cold. Oz never did give nothin' to the Tinman.
Outside was an old buckboard wagon. I wondered how long all this had stood on the prairie, covered by snow and battered by the incessant wind. It was freezing, even in June, on this drizzly day.Abandoned buidings are everywhere out here, each one lonelier and more evocative than the last. This one might have been a schoolhouse, with sturdy little blonde kids inside.
But the rarest of the rare came over the phone as we were birding our way back to Carrington after a long day in Kidder County. Three whooping cranes had been reported from a farm section that was about ten miles from nowhere. We swooped in and spotted them without any problem. It's hard to miss four-foot-high white birds on a muddy field.I am not proud of this photo, but we were almost a mile away, and even at that the cranes were nervous about us--walking away. We dared not press them. Because nothing goes unnoticed for long, even in the middle of nowhere, a truck soon rolled up. Inside was a landowner who had been watching over the birds for more than a week. He had been quiet about them, realizing that they were vanishingly rare and worthy of protection.

It was nice to know they'd had a good week's rest, especially when a car with three clued-in birders appeared on the horizon and drove perhaps a half-mile over the prairie directly toward the birds. The birders got out, bristling with scopes and telephoto lenses, and put them to wing, apparently for good. We were too far away to hail them or to do anything more than shake our heads in bewilderment at the intrusion. It was especially embarrassing given that the landowner had been so gracious to us. The cranes weren't seen again. There were a lot of disappointed birders at the festival for whom whooping crane would have been a life bird.

Asking around with USFWS personnel and checking listservs soon revealed that the three birds were one-year-old males that were led south via an ultralight aircraft from their natal area in Wisconsin. According to Tom Stehn, Whooping Crane Coordinator at Aransas NWR, they returned to central Wisconsin this spring just as researchers had hoped, then (naughty birds) took off for North Dakota. These are the things that radios and color bands tell us. If there's a silver lining to this story, it's probably a good thing that the cranes, imprinted as they are on an ultralight aircraft, still retain such a healthy and well-founded suspicion of people. It's tough to be a tall, white bird that everyone wants a piece of. They're the Brangelinas of the bird world, and they don't like the paparazzi, either.