Operation Migration was founded in 1994 as a non- profit charitable organization by Bill Lishman and Joe Duff. That was five years after Bill became the first human to fly with birds, and one year after the two artists, turned biologists, used ultralight aircraft to lead a small flock of Canada geese from Ontario, Canada to Virginia, USA. The unassisted return migration of these geese the following spring garnered world-wide attention that led to the making of the hit movie Fly Away Home with Columbia Pictures.
To perfect techniques, and ensure that once released, birds conditioned to follow their ultralights would remain wild, several migration studies were conducted with non-endangered Sandhill cranes in subsequent years. The results of these studies were evaluated by the Canada / United States Whooping Crane Recovery Team. Like many birds, Whooping cranes learn their migration route by following their parents. But this knowledge is lost when the species is reduced and there are no longer any wild birds using the flyway. Until Operation Migration was asked by the US Fish and Wildlife Service to spearhead a reintroduction of the world's most endangered cranes, there was no method of teaching migration to captive reared Whooping cranes released into the wild.
In the first seven years of the project, Operation Migration has led 108 Whooping cranes south, teaching them a migration route between Wisconsin and Florida. As of February 2008 the total number of birds in the reintroduced Eastern Migratory Population is 76 – 5 times the number that existed in the early 1940’s. Operation Migration is a founding partner of the Whooping Crane Eastern Partnership (WCEP), the coalition of private and government agencies behind the project to safeguard the endangered Whooping crane from extinction.
|
|
Read our field journal to get the latest update.
|
