Tale of Florida cranes
3/31/95
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RELAYED TEXT STARTS HERE:
/** env.wildlife: 695.0 **/
** Topic: Tale of Florida cranes **
** Written 2:03 PM Mar 31, 1995 by tgray in cdp:env.wildlife **
/* Written 6:05 AM Feb 21, 1995 by theearthtime in
igc:earthtimes */
Title: Take of Florida cranes
By Bill DeYoung NYT Regional Newspapers
Steve Nesbitt is looking for a few good cranes.
Well, they don't have to be particularly good. They don't even
have to be alive, actually.
The birds in question must be Florida sandhill cranes, tall (about
4 feet), gawky gray things with skinny black legs, a pointed beak
and a cap of red feathers on top.
Nesbitt, a biologist with the Florida Game and Fresh Water Fish
Commission in Gainesville, has been conducting field studies on
sandhills -- about 5,000 are believed to live year-round in
Florida -- for more than a decade.
The studies, which involve capturing and tagging young birds to
monitor their movements in the wild, are part of a multi-agency
whooping crane reintroduction project.
The endangered whoopers, which haven't occurred naturally in
Florida since the 1920s, are very close kin to the quite populous
sandhills. So, according to the logic of avian science, you study
the sandhills to learn what the whoopers will (probably) do once
they're released.
Nesbitt is a project coordinator, and his sandhill data has proved
invaluable, leading in part to the release of 14 whooping cranes
in Central Florida last winter.
The books will close on the sandhill field research in July 1994,
and Nesbitt wants to tie up all the loose ends he can.
He estimates that, beginning around 1981, he and his staff placed
colored leg bands in various sequences on 250 sandhill cranes in
the Gainesville/Alachua County area.
Each banded bird has a page in a file in Nesbitt's office, with as
much information -- sex, date of birth, area of birth -- as the
biologists could collect. Many had radio transmitters attached,
too, so the research team could follow their movements precisely.
Transmitter batteries are supposed to last 18 months, and just
before each deadline the team planned to track the crane, catch it
again, replace the battery and let the bird take wing.
But some of those transmitters -- about 25 since the mid- to
late-1980s -- failed within six months, and sometimes the cranes
were in areas too remote to reach. Either way, the birds went on
with their lives and Nesbitt lost all contact.
He really wants to know what happened.
The missing cranes, he explains, could be right under his nose.
``If their daily activity doesn't overlap with an area that's
available to us for monitoring, or in an area where we know cranes
congregate such as Paynes Prairie, Evinston or Kanapaha Prairie,
we may never see them again.
``It could be in somebody's back pasture. It'll spend the rest of
its life in a relatively small area. So it could be secreted away
someplace and stay there for the next 10 years.''
Sandhill cranes are independent of their parents at 10 months, and
their life expectancy is at least 15 years.
Interestingly, the males tend to settle relatively close to the
place where they were reared, while a female will roam a bit and
ultimately set up housekeeping with her mate near his natal area.
Almost all of the M.I.A. cranes, therefore, are females.
Adult sandhills live in open areas -- pastures, marshes and the
like. They aren't egrets, and you won't as a rule find them
standing at the edge of a pond trying to grab minnows for dinner.
The cranes eat bugs, grubs and tiny pieces of vegetation and grain
(that's one reason they often congregate around cattle feed lots).
They do roost in shallow water, however, and they nest near it.
And when they're not striding around in fields or flying in
breathtaking formations, calling loudly to one another, they're
poking about secluded streams and swamps.
The birds maintain fairly strict territories, and if they're
comfortable in an area, they're likely to turn up there day after
day.
Of those tagged in the vicinity of Gainesville, Nesbitt says, the
missing birds should be within a 40-mile radius.
``We've got records of birds going as far east as Palatka, as far
west as Trenton, and as far south as Williston going towards
Ocala,'' he explains.
``I think what we're going to see is that these guys have just set
up house in some piece of marsh and pasture where we can't get
access to them.''
Nesbitt stresses that his office gets calls ``all the time'' from
people who've spotted banded cranes. Each caller is asked the
location of the sighting, and if it's a known area, and that's
usually the end of the investigation.
However, Nesbitt adds, ``In just the last year, we've received two
calls with sightings of little-seen birds.''
In those cases, Nesbitt hopped in his truck, field glasses in
hand, and went to spy on the fugitives.
Bird-loving callers need not fear the game commission. ``We just
want to look at 'em,'' Nesbitt says. ``We're not going to take
them back.''
He wants reports of dead birds, too, and parts of dead birds --
provided the colored bands, or some of them, are still there.
Every little bit helps.
So what should the eagle-eyed be looking for?
``Each bird gets its own particular combination of colors, so it's
individually distinct,'' Nesbitt says. ``There are five colors in
four possible positions, with some combined colors. So there's
hundreds and hundreds of potential combinations.''
Some of the bands are plastic, some are metal. They're each about
one inch wide.
``It's a fairly complicated system. And we don't necessarily
expect the general public to be able to differentiate, to give us
an accurate reading,'' he says.
``By the '80s, we'd gotten to the point where just sightings of
marked birds weren't doing us much good. What we really needed was
information on specific individuals through a long period of
time.''
It's especially important that callers don't confuse the resident
population of sandhills with the enormous flocks of migrating
birds -- 25,000 last year -- that descend on Florida from the
Midwest every winter.
The sandhill migrants will be here in November. That's one reason
Nesbitt is sending out his message now.
``You may not be able to tell exactly what colors are there, but
it certainly does look different, particularly if there's a radio
on them,'' he says. "The radios are very conspicuous.''
Don't worry about calling in information the biologists may not
need, Nesbitt explains. At this point, they're happy to get any
news at all. "Basically, what we're interested in are pairs of
birds that are in somebody's pasture, or in the pond on their
property ...all we really need is for somebody to call and say
`we've got some marked sandhill cranes.' We'll do the rest."
Collect calls are welcome. The number, local to Gainesville, is
904-336-2230.
There's no reward, Nesbitt says, adding with a laugh, ``other than
the self-satisfaction of contributing information to science.
"And we can tell them where their birds came from, how old they
are, how many young they've produced, who their mom and daddy
were, things like that."
Bill DeYoung is Arts & Entertainment Editor of The Gainesville
Sun.
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