These Historic Photos Show the Groundbreaking Campaign to Save the Last Whooping Cranes

By the 1940s, Whooping Cranes seemed all but lost. The last migratory flock, which wintered at Aransas National Wildlife Refuge on the central Texas coast, had dwindled to 15 birds in 1941. Their former breeding grounds on the northern prairies lay empty; the locations of their remaining nest sites, presumed to be somewhere farther north, were still unknown.

But in 1946 the National Audubon Society put Robert Porter Allen in charge of their Whooping Crane project. Already renowned for his studies of Roseate Spoonbills in Florida and American Flamingos in the Bahamas, Allen seemed the best candidate for this final attempt to pull the stately white cranes back from the edge of extinction. Part scientist, part goodwill ambassador, he worked to understand the birds’ requirements for survival and to sway public sentiment in their favor.

With this last desperate effort to save the birds drawing media attention, Life magazine sent famed photographer Andreas Feininger to document Allen’s research in Texas in January 1947. After four days in a blind, Feininger captured a portrait (at top) showing a dark-headed young crane with its parents. Taken with a 20-inch (500mm) telephoto lens, this was a reasonably good picture of such a rare species, given the camera equipment available at the time. Its publication in a major national magazine boosted Allen’s campaign to build support for the iconic waders.

During Allen’s first winter of research in Texas, he studied the cranes’ behavior, including their feeding habits, to determine whether the resources at the Aransas refuge were adequate for their survival. Getting close enough for observation was a challenge. 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. (This “bull blind” proved only partially successful for close observation of cranes and for Feininger’s attempts at photography, but a neighboring bull once showed a little too much interest and forced Allen into a tense stare-down.) 

To survey the food available to the cranes, Allen used a seine, a type of vertical fishing net with a tight mesh, stretching it across shallow channels in areas where the birds had been seen foraging. Omnivorous like other crane species, the Whoopers at Aransas fed mainly on crabs, mud shrimps, razor clams, and other creatures in shallow waters. The surveys showed that habitat and food supplies on the Texas wintering grounds seemed sufficient, and Allen concluded that migration season and the still-undiscovered breeding grounds must hold the keys to the species’ survival.

With the realization that illegal shooting during migration might pose the greatest hazard to the cranes, Allen published articles and encouraged conservation partners to educate the public about protecting the birds along their migratory route. But he recognized the importance of finding the northern terminus of that route, to determine whether the birds were safe on their breeding grounds. For several summers, he flew floatplane surveys over northwestern Canada, north of the points where migrating cranes had been seen. A breakthrough finally came in 1954, when Canadian Forest Service helicopter pilots spotted a pair of Whoopers with a chick near the Sass River in the Northwest Territories. 

The following year, Allen traveled to the Sass River region on behalf of the National Audubon Society, along with Ray Stewart of the Canadian Wildlife Service and Robert E. Stewart (no relation) of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. This small crew spent six arduous weeks, from May to July 1955, camping in near-impenetrable wilderness to document the nesting cranes and their habitat.

When Allen emerged from the wilderness and arrived at the frontier town of Fort Smith, Northwest Territories, on July 3, 1955, his return didn’t go unnoticed. Reporter John O’Reilly from the New York Herald-Tribune was waiting in Fort Smith to meet him, a reflection of how the search had piqued public curiosity. Within days, people all over the continent were reading of the monumental (and successful) effort to confirm the breeding grounds of the endangered birds.

The heroic work by Robert Porter Allen and others in the 1940s and 1950s ushered in decades of slow and steady conservation progress. The Whooping Crane, on the edge of extinction 80 years ago, has made an impressive comeback, and the wild population now numbers close to 700 individuals.