By Julie Zickefoose

Five feet tall, with a 7-foot wingspan, the whooping crane is a Pleistocene relic that has somehow survived into the 21st century. Slammed by hunting and habitat loss, whoopers hit a low of 22 individuals in 1941; it's been a slow and arduous conservationist-assisted climb to today's modest peak of 700 birds. "Into Whooperland" is the moving story of Michael Forsberg's quest to know a snow-white and ebony bird for which the descriptor "magnificent" barely suffices.

To make this book, Mr. Forsberg, a photographer from Nebraska, traveled some 50,000 miles in four years along the "Whooper Highway" -- the birds' ancient migratory route that stretches from coastal Texas to the Northwest Territories of Canada -- producing 100,000 images, 50 hours of video and filling 10 "coffee-stained" journals. Among his most treasured experiences: two brand-new whooping-crane chicks meeting their parents on a massive nest of reeds, a sight that moved him to tears.

What is the bird without its journey? It's April 2, 2022; 77 degrees and sunny on the Texas coast. Mr. Forsberg and his pilot friend Chris Boyer climb into a tiny red 1957 Cessna propeller plane fitted with cameras on the wings, body and tail, plus one shooting straight down from its belly at 7-second intervals. The two head north, flying at the elevation and relative pace of migrating whoopers, toward Wood Buffalo National Park, on the border between Alberta and the Northwest Territories, where it is 11 degrees and snowing. Birds and men are grounded by 50 mph blizzard winds in North Dakota. Business as usual for migrating whoopers. The flight would take three weeks.

Stunning scenes of their prairie flyway roll out below: intensive agriculture; tiny pothole remnants; still-frozen lakes; massive open-pit mines in Alberta's tar sands oil exploitation -- too perilously near the living, breathing watery wilderness that is the cranes' last resort. A pair of cranes lace dinosaur tracks across golden silt in seemingly endless lagoons, home at last. Their cinnamon-colored chicks are the embodiment of hope in a relentlessly changing world. That they make this journey and survive it at all, much less return to Texas' shrinking coastline with a chick in tow, defies belief. In his heroic quest to understand the bird, Mr. Forsberg shows us what it is to be a whooping crane, dauntless and prevailing, in the perilous landscape of man.

--Ms. Zickefoose is an advising editor for BWD magazine and the author and illustrator of "Saving Jemima: Life and Love With a Hard-Luck Jay."

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

January 17, 2025 10:26 ET (15:26 GMT)

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