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, )' \ [" J;. \'yA ob (}"'b~r\ "ly, 'f~ Y civilization, almost to the point of extinction. By the late 1930s only one whooper flock numbering 13 birds was left in the wild. This flock, which now numbers 75, spends its winters on the Texas Gulf Coast just north of Corpus Christi, where in 1938 the Aransas National Wildlife Refuge was established to try to save the whooping crane. Like all cranes, the whooper is a migratory bird. Each spring, ordinarily during April and May, the cranes leave Aransas in groups of twos or threes for their summer roosting sites. In 1954 it was discovered that the summer home of the Aransas flock is Wood Buffalo National Park in northern Canada. Each nest- ing pair produces two eggs, though it is rare for more than one of the pair to survive. In the fall, usually between October and the first of December, the flock leaves Wood Buffalo to return to Aransas. Twice each year, then, the cranes undertake a migration of over 2000 miles along the Central Flyway used by a number of other migratory birds. The Big Bend area of the Platte River is used by the cranes as a rest stop during these migrations. These stopovers are especially important in the spring when cranes have been known to spend up to 6 weeks on the Platte River resting up for the rest of the trip and, if spring comes late, waiting for the snow to melt farther north. Parenthetically, it might be noted that the Aransas-Wood Buffalo flock no longer contains the only surviving whooping cranes in the world. There are also 22 birds at the Patuxent Wildlife Research Center in Laurel, Maryland, where FWS scientists are attempting to learn more about the whooping crane. One result of their experiments--and which is itself an experiment--is an at- tempt to establish a second whooper flock in the wild with a "foster parents" program. The foster parents in this case are a large flock of sandhill cranes that winter at Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge in New Mexico and summer in Grays Lake National Wildlife Refuge (NWR) in Idaho. Whooper eggs from Patuxent and from Wood Buffalo have been introduced into the nests of sandhill cranes at Grays Lake. The first part of this experiment has been a success. The sandhills raise the intruders as their own, and a half dozen young whoopers now fly with the sandhill flock. The crucial second part of the experiment will come when the whoopers reach breeding age (about 5 years). will they seek out other whoopers to mate with, or will they regard themselves as sandhi lIs? The success of this program will mark a giant step forward for 32