Members of the Green Source Texas Team traveled to the Whooping Crane Festival in Port Aransas in February. Pictured Thomas Johns, Wendel Withrow, Julie Thibodeaux and Karl Thibodeaux.
We came, we saw the whoopers, we conferenced.
Two weeks ago, as part of our new statewide coverage as Green Source Texas, a team headed down to the Texas Gulf Coast to attend the Whooping Crane Festival in Port Aransas. Friends of GSTX from North Texas, including members of the Greater Fort Worth Sierra Club, met up with us at the event.
The 29th annual fest celebrates the return of the last remaining wild population of whooping cranes to their wintering habitat at the Aransas National Wildlife Refuge and the greater Texas Coastal Bend.
The four-day event features speakers, birding trips, boating trips, nature tours, photography workshops,and an expo.
"This was our first state-wide reporting trip," said Green Source Texas director Wendel Withrow. "Stay tuned for more stories to come."
CONSERVATION ROCK STAR
On Friday night, we squeezed into a roomful of craniacs at the University of Texas Marine Science Institute’s Patton Center to hear the guru of crane conservation Michael Forsberg deliver the keynote.
The wildlife photographer, author and faculty member from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, spoke at the soldout event.
A mesmerizing storyteller, Forsberg spun tales of whooping crane lore and anecdotes aimed to school newbies and inspire bird lovers into action to protect the endangered birds.
According to a source at the event, Forsberg was being filmed in coordination with Cornell University for a potential PBS documentary.
DECLINE AND RISE
During his talk, Forsberg relayed the tragic history of whooping cranes in North America. Although the big birds were once widespread across the Great Plains, their populations declined in the late 1800s and early 1900s, when pioneers cleared land and drained wetlands for farming. Whooping cranes were also hunted for their feathers, prized in the fashion world.
In 1946, the National Audubon Society put biologist Robert Porter Allen in charge of their whooping crane project. His task was to learn what their requirements were for survival and to sway public sentiment. To observe whooping cranes at the Aransas National Wildlife Refuge, he built a “dummy cow” to conceal his presence.
“The birds seemed unafraid of grazing livestock, so Allen stretched canvas over a frame to make it look like a cow, painting it reddish brown to match the local herds of Santa Gertrudis cattle,” according to Audubon magazine.
(Although that backfired when he got into a stare-down with a neighboring bull.)
At that time there were only 16 whooping cranes wintering on the Texas coast.
Allen didn’t know where they were coming from. He put out flyers asking people to let him know when and where they saw them and used the information to start a migration map. But he was still not able to locate their nesting grounds.
A breakthrough came after Canadian Forest Service helicopter pilots spotted a pair of whoopers with a chick near the Sass River in the Northwest Territories.
Allen and a small crew spent six weeks camping in the wilderness to document nesting cranes and their habitat in the 17,000-square-mile Wood Buffalo National Park in Canada.
Thanks to this discovery and decades of conservation efforts, the last remaining migrating whooping bird population has increased to more than 500.
WHOOP DREAMS
Whooping cranes are the tallest bird in North America. They stand five feet tall and have a wingspan of an “NBA basketball player,” Forsberg joked.
Their feathers are so white that the birds appear to glow from the inside like a lantern, he said. They can live to be more than 20 years in the wild and up to 40 years in captivity. They mate for life.
“They’re remarkable parents,” said Forsberg.
The chicks are a cinnamon color and by the end of their first year, they turn completely white.
Their numbers have always been naturally low as they don’t reach full maturity until they’re five years old.
"We estimate that in the mid-1800s there were around 1,200 to 1,500 Whooping Cranes in North America," says the International Crane Foundation.
Couples have only two chicks a year and only one typically survives due to siblicide.
“They’re born full of piss and vinegar,” said Forsberg. “That’s what you need to survive. In a lot of ways, it’s like us.”
Forsberg has gone to great lengths over three decades to photograph them.
In his 2025 book, Into Whooperland, he documents his journey in a small plane along their spring migration route from the Texas Coast to Northwest Canada.
He and his friend, a pilot, flew 18 days in a 1957 Cessna 172 across more than 2,500 miles.
They weren’t flying amongst the cranes but they mimicked the way the whooping cranes traveled.
“We didn’t know how far we were going to fly, where we were going to eat, where we were going to sleep,” said Forsberg.
The trip was uplifting as well as disturbing.
“I saw the wonder and the worry,” he said. “I took 30,000 pictures and 98 percent of those photos had ‘us’ in them,” referring to development, agriculture, tar sands mining.
He also spent eight days in a camouflaged blind in the Canadian wilderness photographing their nesting grounds.
At the festival talk, he lamented that despite their protected status, they’re still poached by humans.
In 2023, four hunters in Oklahoma were charged with shooting and killing four whooping cranes.
Also troubling, last year, the first known whooping crane death of Avian flu was documented.
“These birds are in our world. We get to decide if they survive in spite of us or because of us.”
Coming soon! The Green Source Texas team visits the Padre Island National Seashore, Aransas National Wildlife Refuge and take the Whooping Crane Boat Tour