Whooping Cranes Came Back From the Brink of Extinction. Now, New Threats Are Converging on Their Texas Wintering Grounds
Some residents along the Gulf Coast are creating habitat for the endangered birds on their properties, but development, saltwater intrusion and bird flu are putting pressure on the species' recovery
Whooping Cranes Came Back From the Brink of Extinction. Now, New Threats Are Converging on Their Texas Wintering Grounds
Some residents along the Gulf Coast are creating habitat for the endangered birds on their properties, but development, saltwater intrusion and bird flu are putting pressure on the species’ recovery
Rene Ebersole, Undark
January 8, 2026 7:30 a.m.
A whooping crane in flight in Texas
John Noll / USDA
Each fall—always before Thanksgiving—Diane Johnson looks to the sky above her home, waiting for the moment when her birds return. “You look up, and they’re here,” she says. “And you remember how magnificent they really are.”
Twenty-six years ago, though, those same magnificent birds had Johnson and her husband, Al, worried their dream of building their forever home on the Texas Gulf Coast’s Lamar Peninsula—a weather-worn stretch of marsh, coastal plain and live oak woodlands—might be slipping away. It was the winter of 1999, and Al, a home builder, and Diane, a stay-at-home mom, had just scraped together practically every last dollar to buy 828 acres about 20 minutes northeast of downtown Rockport.
There was one thing they hadn’t bargained for, however: a resident pair of whooping cranes strutting across their newly acquired lawn. One of just 15 crane species on Earth—ten of them threatened with extinction—North America’s whooping cranes were so imperiled that the entire population then hovered around 180 birds. The couple was awestruck by the roughly five-foot-tall birds, with their ivory plumage and crimson crowns, but they couldn’t help worrying that the federal government might stop them from building a house in the middle of an endangered species’ turf.
In those first uneasy days, as they watched the cranes forage through the marsh grass, the Johnsons realized that their dream home sat squarely inside a much larger story—one that stretched far beyond their property line, into the vast migration corridors and fragile ecosystems the birds depended on.
The whooping crane, North America’s tallest bird, almost went extinct in the 20th century. While its population has now rebounded, the endangered species still faces threats.
Klaus Nigge / USFWS
The whooping crane’s comeback is often hailed as one of the greatest wildlife conservation success stories in North America—but the forces that nearly wiped the species out are surging again in new and more complex forms. Once driven to the brink by rampant habitat loss and hunting, the cranes survived only through an extraordinary, decades-long rescue effort. Now, development pressure, shrinking freshwater flows, sea-level rise and the threat of avian flu are converging on the wintering habitat along the Texas coast just as the flock reaches its highest numbers in about a century. The stakes remain perilously high for the birds—and for the people who share their land.
This spot in Texas is the primary wintering destination for the only purely wild whooping crane flock in the world. The life of every one of these cranes begins in a nest of trampled bulrushes, sedges and cattails in Canada’s Northwest Territories and Alberta, predominantly in Wood Buffalo National Park. The chicks hatch in late spring and into summer, cinnamon and white with blue eyes, and by late August they’ve grown nearly as large as their parents. By September or October, they are robust enough to join them on their maiden flight of about 2,500 miles south. As cool autumn winds rise, families of cranes take to the sky, traveling a flyway tracing straight through the American heartland and navigating a gauntlet of industrial agriculture, energy development, pollution and even poachers.
After surviving this arduous journey, most cranes arrive on the Texas coast by late November. Here, within a mosaic of marshes and tidal flats stretching across the Aransas National Wildlife Refuge and into nearby private lands—including the Johnsons’ property—they stalk blue crabs in brackish shallows and nibble on scarlet wolfberries.
Key concept: Wild whooping cranes
Only one natural and self-sustaining population of whooping cranes exists in the world: the Aransas-Wood Buffalo group, which flies between Texas’ Aransas National Wildlife Refuge and Canada’s Wood Buffalo National Park each year.
Experimental, non-migratory populations live in Central Florida and Louisiana, and another experimental group migrates between Wisconsin and Florida.
The Johnsons, overwhelmed but determined, sought guidance on what it meant to share their land with two of some of the rarest birds on Earth. They reached out to their acquaintance Tom Stehn, a biologist at the Aransas National Wildlife Refuge—which was established in 1937 to protect whooping cranes and other migratory birds and wildlife—and co-leader of the International Crane Recovery Team. Stehn conducted weekly aerial surveys throughout the winter months.
“We called him and said, ‘Oh my gosh, we have whooping cranes on our land that we just bought,’” Diane, now 74, remembers with a warm smile and a raspy Texas drawl. “He goes, ‘Of course, I know.’ … So, we asked him, ‘Well, what do we do? We want to preserve this property for the whooping cranes.’”
Stehn introduced the Johnsons to representatives with the Nature Conservancy. The group offered a plan to purchase 244 acres from the Johnsons and donate it to the Aransas National Wildlife Refuge on the other side of Saint Charles Bay. They also offered the couple a payment to place 573 acres under a conservation easement—providing a tax benefit in exchange for a perpetual commitment that the land would never be developed. The Johnsons reserved ten acres where they would build their home and other structures. “It was a win-win,” Diane says. “We wanted to do everything they wanted us to do.”
A whooping crane catches a crab in the Aransas National Wildlife Refuge in Texas.
Jon G. Fuller / VWPics / Universal Images Group via Getty Images
Such habitat protections to safeguard Texas coastal marsh, tidal flats and upland prairies—combined with landmark environmental legislation in the 1970s, captive breeding programs and the efforts of an army of conservationists—have played an important role preventing North America’s tallest bird from joining the passenger pigeon and Carolina parakeet in oblivion. About eight decades ago, only about 16 whooping cranes were left in the wild. Preserving their wintering grounds helped the remnant flock begin to rebound. Today, the Aransas-Wood Buffalo flock consists of more than 550 cranes, according to the latest population survey, and more than 270 additional whoopers live in zoos or experimental release programs in Wisconsin and Louisiana. A few also live in Florida following the end of a release program there.
Yet despite their growing numbers, whooping cranes remain endangered. The Lamar Peninsula presents a microcosm of the challenges wild cranes now face—and what can be done to help them continue to grow and expand their range. The Johnsons’ dream home, Diane’s silo-like silversmith studio and a former rental cabin sit on one of the last large pieces of open wetland and live oak savanna on the peninsula, shielding their resident cranes from much of the surrounding development.
Outside their gate, though, houses dot much of the peninsula. Cranes often wander through residents’ yards, where automated feeders drop corn to attract deer—visibility that helps people appreciate the birds, but density that can spell danger.
For cranes, living in close quarters with people comes at a cost, wildlife managers say, because it increases the chances that these birds with more than seven-foot wingspans will collide with power lines or that an outbreak of highly pathogenic avian influenza—easily spread when the birds are crowded together in a confined area—will kill some of the animals. In September 2025, the International Crane Foundation reported that the first whooping crane—a captive-bred bird named “Ducky” that was set to be released into the wild in Wisconsin—had died from bird flu. By late October, there were reports of at least two more whooping cranes killed by bird flu while migrating south from their Canadian breeding grounds.
Meanwhile, saltwater intrusion associated with sea-level rise is converting freshwater wetlands to open water. Freshwater diversions for upstream urbanizing areas are altering the salinity of coastal estuaries where cranes feed, and drought, intensified by climate change, is drying the freshwater ponds where cranes drink.
No one threat alone will likely reverse the whooping cranes’ recovery, says Liz Smith, a local conservation scientist who worked for the International Crane Foundation until her recent retirement, but there’s a common source. “When you put all those together,” she says. “They’re all human-driven.”
“It’s us.”
When I visit the Lamar Peninsula hoping to see wintering whooping cranes, I find a billboard along State Highway 35: “Lots for Sale.” Driving through a neighborhood of one-story houses with big garages and campers and boats in the driveways, I finally come to the gravel road leading to a popular whooper hangout: the home of Kevin and Lori Sims. Though the peninsula’s density is a challenge for cranes, the Sims, like the Johnsons, represent one of its paradoxes—local residents who are deeply invested in helping the birds and engaging others in their protection, even as development continues around them.
An adult whooping crane and a juvenile at Aransas National Wildlife Refuge
Jon G. Fuller / VWPics / Universal Images Group via Getty Images
Wearing an old T-shirt, a royal blue sweatshirt, jeans and sneakers, Kevin is tending to a steaming shrimp boil near the garage in preparation for an evening family gathering. “Look up!” he yells, as I exit the car. Four whooping cranes cruise about 40 feet over my head and land in the grass, not far from his automated deer feeder. “You go get in the blind, and I’ll press the remote control for the feeder,” he says. “Maybe that will bring them in.”
Following his instructions, I tiptoe across a soggy span of grass and mud to a primitive bird blind built from plywood and 2-by-4s, complete with a metal roof and pink fishnet curtains. As I take a seat in a plastic chair, the cranes do another flyby. Kevin hits the button on his remote, and as the corn drops from the feeder, two deer come running. Soon, three cranes land: two parents and their colt, hatched in northern Canada roughly six months earlier. A fourth crane, a young adult female known locally as Husker Red and identifiable by her white-red-white leg bands, tries to move in for some corn too. The crane family chases her away, loudly bugling and flapping their giant, black-tipped wings, delivering an obvious message: Scram—we were here first. Husker bugles back.
When a car engine revs, the cranes startle. Momentarily, they retreat to the marsh.
“There was quite a little drama down there,” I say, joining Kevin at the garage.
“They put on a show for you,” he says.
The Sims have a boat business, and each year they take about 800 tourists and photographers along the coast to see cranes. After their cruise, some customers enjoy close-up photo opportunities with cranes that come to the couple’s corn feeder.
Some Texans use automated feeders to bait deer so they can shoot them. The Sims and the Johnsons have them purely to enjoy the nature they attract. “I grew up with deer in the yard,” Kevin explains. He wanted the same for his kids, so he put up a corn feeder. It was during a drought, and the family soon got more than they’d bargained for. “Here came the cranes,” he says. “I never expected it.”
But there’s a downside to this seemingly harmless practice, says Dave Brandt, a recently retired USGS biologist who spent more than a decade catching whooping cranes on their Texas wintering grounds and in Canada, fitting them with leg bands and transmitters that help biologists track their migrations and identify the birds when they’re spotted. The problem is the feeders bring cranes in close contact with people and encourage the birds to concentrate in a tiny area, where they feed with other animals—deer, feral hogs, ducks—increasing the potential for them to encounter bird flu and other pathogens. Because whooping cranes are territorial, they often squabble over who has dibs. “Typically, at these feeders, you’ll get a dominant pair or a dominant family group that kind of guards them,” Brandt says.
These territorial interactions can end in tragedy. On February 14, 2023, a crane that Brandt thinks was likely being chased by another at the Sims’ feeder struck a power line and died. Lori Sims, who doesn’t believe the crane was being chased, was one of the first people on the scene. “I went right over, and I stood with the crane,” she remembers. “It hit the top and the bottom lines at the same time, and it instantly killed it.”
A woman who had been taking photographs of the cranes caught the whole incident on her phone and called Smith, the conservation scientist, who remembers feeling intense loss and sadness when she saw the dead crane. “His two winter companions landed in a field nearby and did not move for hours,” she says. “I could not shake the feeling that this shouldn’t have happened.”
In response to the incident, the power company removed some inactive lines and marked others with diverters, small devices placed on the lines, so the cranes are better able to see them. “That helped, but there’s always a potential of lines all around the peninsula that could be dangerous,” Smith says. “We’re worried that that is going to continue to increase. And with so many birds chasing each other around,” she says, that’s a danger. There are also many nearby power lines connecting towns and cities to wind farms. “One would think that there would not be permits allowed for, let’s say, wind farms, as the birds narrow their scope down to that small area in and around the Aransas Wildlife Refuge,” Smith says, but there are large farms just dozens of miles away, with more on the way.
A whooping crane (center) stands among sandhill cranes in Grantsburg, Wisconsin.
Lorie Shaull via Flickr under CC BY 2.0
Smith says the main factor ensuring that the cranes have enough food during their winter months in Texas is the health of the Guadalupe Estuary, which varies with the freshwater flowing from the San Antonio and Guadalupe Rivers. Under Texas law, the state owns those waters; the use is regulated by the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, a state agency. When the flow is disrupted—whether by extreme drought or by ongoing freshwater diversions—San Antonio Bay can become too saline for healthy crab populations and wolfberry plants. And that can kill cranes.
During a drought spanning 2008 and 2009, 23 whooping cranes died from likely starvation, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The population dropped to 247 wild birds. (Historical estimates put the population at about 10,000 before European settlement.) Environmentalists and birders were outraged that the state did not take additional steps to mitigate the effects of the diminished flows. The agency “did not change anything during that severe drought,” Smith says. “Water continued to be diverted as usual.” Some concerned citizens got together and formed a nonprofit organization, the Aransas Project, to protect whooping crane habitat. The group sued the commission, alleging that the agency had violated the Endangered Species Act because their actions and failures in regard to public water management during the drought had resulted in the cranes’ deaths. “The basis of the lawsuit was that they acted irresponsibly,” Smith says.
The group won the suit in federal court, but the agency appealed the ruling, which an appeals court overturned on grounds that the impacts of the water withdrawals on the endangered birds had been too indirect and unforeseeable to meet the legal standard. Since then, the Aransas Project and the Guadalupe-Blanco River Authority, which manages water resources in the area, have worked out an agreement to support conservation in the Guadalupe River Basin.
A whooping crane chick. The birds hatch in late spring and into summer in Canada’s Northwest Territories and Alberta. By September or October, the young birds have grown enough to migrate some 2,500 miles south to the Texas coast.
International Crane Foundation / USFWS via Flickr under CC BY 2.0
The cranes are as vulnerable as ever to freshwater shortages. At the same time, rising seas are causing saltwater intrusion, which some conservation groups predict will convert more than half of the coast’s freshwater wetlands to open water by the end of the century. Smith says protecting more habitat is the key if the cranes are to have somewhere to go. “If we wanted to really do something meaningful on the coast, we would have to do another 50,000-acre, 100,000-acre kind of a deal,” she says. “We just don’t know where that land would be. It’s getting very fragmented.”
While that long-term goal is daunting, in mid-December, the International Crane Foundation, the Conservation Fund and the Coastal Bend Bays & Estuaries Program announced the acquisition of more than 3,300 acres of critical whooping crane winter habitat along the Texas coast. The new sanctuary—purchased for just over $8.4 million, according to the Associated Press—includes two properties, one of which will be owned and managed by the International Crane Foundation as the Wolfberry Whooping Crane Sanctuary, with the other held by the Conservation Fund until it is transferred to the Coastal Bend Bays & Estuaries Program.
The whooping cranes’ future depends on land purchases, says Diane Johnson, “because as their numbers grow, the more land they’re going to need.” But it can be hard to convince landowners to put their properties in easements, she says, recounting a time years ago when a man was trying to sell his property near the roughly 300-acre Goose Island State Park on the southern end of the Lamar Peninsula, surrounded by the Saint Charles and Aransas Bays. She and her husband introduced him to the Nature Conservancy in hopes that he might put the property in an easement as they had so many years ago. “The family would not go for it,” she says. “They wanted cash from a developer.” Instead of remaining a haven for cranes, the property was transformed to “The Reserve at St. Charles Bay,” marketing luxury waterfront homes for families wanting to be surrounded by nature. Johnson was so angry, she threatened her builder husband Al that if he ever put up a house in that development, she and their daughters would picket his job site. “That’s how strongly I felt about building over there,” she says.
Fortunately, Al felt just as passionately about protecting crane habitat. The Johnsons are widely celebrated by the conservation community for their efforts to protect whooping cranes. A 2019 “Good Egg Award”—given by the International Crane Foundation for their voluntary actions to save whooping crane wintering habitat—is proudly displayed on a shelf in their dining area next to a framed print of Our Lady of Guadalupe. When legendary ornithologist and conservationist George Archibald, co-founder of the International Crane Foundation, headquartered in Baraboo, Wisconsin, comes to town each winter for an annual crane conference, he beats a path to the Johnsons to hang out with them and their resident pair of whoopers, Yay and Nay.
Yay is named for the identification bands biologists put on her leg: yellow, aluminum, yellow. And if she’s Yay, then someone said his name must be Nay, Diane says, laughing.
Over the years, Archibald has given the Johnsons advice on everything from how to mow the grass so a bobcat hiding in the weeds won’t sneak up and grab a crane, to the perfect slope for Yay and Nay to easily wade into the artificial ponds on the property.
Diane says they’d really like to see others buy land and protect it. In fact, there’s a 52-acre pasture on the Lamar Peninsula now for sale. “It’s full of whooping cranes. One day, there were 24 whooping cranes in one spot,” she says. At the end of December, the owner was asking $6.45 million. “Every time you ask about it, it goes up another million.”
If the land gets developed, there’s little chance that cranes will relocate to their place, she says: Yay and Nay wouldn’t allow it. “Let’s say two whooping cranes from over there at the pasture fly over. Ours start cussing and yelling at ’em—‘Don’t you even think about landing here.’ It’s hilarious. And so if they do land, then ours will start walking over in a posture that’s like, you know, ‘I’m gonna whip your butt.’” She respects them for their determination to keep hundreds of acres of wetlands, uplands and corn feeders all to themselves, and their territoriality illustrates why more land needs to be protected. “They’re pretty badass, when you think about it.”
In a few months it will be time for the cranes to head back to northern Canada, where they will rebuild nests and raise a new generation of chicks. “Sometimes I get to see them go,” Diane tells me. “The wind has to be just right.”
“They’ll kettle up and then they’ll take off, and when that happens—I can almost cry right now—I hate to see them go, but it’s beautiful,” she added. “Bon voyage.”
This article was originally published on Undark. Read the original article.
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