Spring 2001 Whooping Crane Migrational Survey Protocol Implementation Report

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something other than a whooping crane on the ground (i.e., the ground crew located the white object and it was not a whooping crane). Ninety -four ground survey routes, totaling 1976 miles, were driven by Whooper Watch participants between March 20, 2001 and April 20, 2001 (Table 3). There was 1 crane group detected. One group of 3 cranes was detected on April 11, 2001 by Larry Rogers, Nebraska Wildlife Federation Whooper Watch Coordinator, and was confirmed by the USFWS as sighting OIA -07 (Wally Jobman, USFWS, pers. comm.). This crane group (01A -07) was located in TBN, R13W, Section 8, South 1/2. The location of this group was not forwarded to the ground monitoring crew in time to observe use sites or measure use site characteristics. Therefore this crane group did not receive a Program number and is not in the database. Use site characteristics were measured at each location a whooping crane was sighted by the air crew, tracked by the ground crew, or reported by public. The protocol did not define the movements or actions required by a crane group to constitute a new use location. During the spring 2001 implementation, AIM designated anew location for a whooping crane group whenever the group flew between two locations. There were 36 unique use sites identified during the ground monitoring by AIM (Figure 1). One of the riverine use sites was observed in use on two consecutive days resulting in 37 use sites. The 37 use sites were entered in the Program dataset as representing use sites by either crane group Ol or 03 (Table 4). The USFWS classified all confirmed sightings resulting from the spring aerial survey (Program crane group numbers 01 and 03) as occurring from the same individual whooping crane group and numbered the sighting in the USFWS database as OIA -03 (Wally Jobman, USFWS, pers. comm.). Seven of the 37 use sites were located in the wetted channel of the Platte River. Five of the 7 riverine use sites were observed by the aircrew and recorded on the datasheets. One of these sites was reported by the City of Kearney personnel to Mark Humpert of NGPC and relayed to the ground crew. The ground crew observed this crane group on March 23, 2001 and also independently observed this crane group on March 24, 2001 during the aerial flight. The other two of the 7 riverine use sites were incidental observations, one of these was reported to the crew by Mike Forsburg, and one of these was seen by Terry Mendjo while driving. At their March 14 meeting, the Technical Committee decided that water and sediment type information would not be measured at out -of- channel use sites without standing water. (Text from March 2001 TC minutes: "The technical committee decided that infields with no standing water, all measurements can be obtained off-site using a laser -range finder to get distance to visual obstruction and by using a soil map to get soil type. Fields with standing water will have all measurements taken. '). With the exception of the Land Cover Class information, the data reported below comes from the seven locations of crane groups in water, all of which were riverine use sites. Riverine use site number 4 was used on 2 consecutive nights, but the use site characteristics were measured only once. III.A. Land cover class Twenty -two of the 37 (59.46 %) use sites were in corn fields, 7 (18.92 %) use sites were in the wetted channel, 2 (5.41 %) use sites were in corn/barren, 1 (2.70 %) use site was in a barren field, 1 use site was in the grassy buffer strip between corn fields, 1 use Spring 2001 Whooping Crane Survey Report 3 11/19/01