In 1954, an eight-year-old George Archibald was sitting in a one-room school in Nova Scotia when he heard a CBC radio program about whooping cranes in Northern Canada.
It was a dramatization: actors portrayed two cranes, and one was panicking about their nesting grounds being discovered, fearing the cranes would soon be killed. Her mate reassured her that they lived in an area protected by the Canadian government and they were safe.
That program changed Archibald’s life — and the cranes’ future. As an adult, he devoted himself to conservation, co-founding the International Crane Foundation (ICF) and spending more than five decades facilitating the birds’ stunning recovery.
In the 1940s, there were fewer than 20 whooping cranes left. Today, there are more than 800, though they are still an endangered species. Dances With Cranes, an episode of The Nature of Things, features a year in the life of whooping cranes and the humans saving them from extinction.
Wooing a bird that loved only humans
Dances With Cranes has a very literal meaning — Archibald’s work to bring back whooping cranes from the brink of extinction involved deep knee bends, flapping his arms, and jumping up and down.
In the 1960s, a whooping crane — which came to be known as Tex — was hatched and raised in a zoo, but mistakes were made in her upbringing.
“The director of the zoo took this little bird into his home, and it became hopelessly imprinted on humans,” Archibald says in the documentary. “For 10 years, they tried pairing Tex to a male crane. She had absolutely no interest in cranes, but when male zookeepers walked by, she would start dancing.”
Archibald offered to work with Tex, and she was sent to the ICF in 1976. To trigger her reproductive cycle — so she could be artificially inseminated — Archibald learned to dance like a crane. Dancing is the bird’s language of courtship.
And after seven years, it worked. Tex laid a viable egg, producing a whooping crane named Gee Whiz. That bird produced 26 of his own offspring, which in turn resulted in about 130 more chicks.
