Following Whooping Cranes by Plane Along the “Whooper Highway”

From the Autumn 2025 issue of Living Bird magazine. Subscribe now.

As Nebraska photographer Michael Forsberg shot thousands of photos of Sandhill Cranes, he would occasionally see migrating Whooping Cranes mixed in with the large flocks of sandhills. Alabaster white in contrast to the dusky sandhills and taller by a foot, the Whooping Cranes popped from the scene as if they were beacons.

To see one “changes you,” Forsberg says. “At least it changed me.” 

In the years after he published On Ancient Wings, his 2004 book on Sandhill Cranes, Forsberg received encouragement from a lot of people, from crane experts to his dad, to shoot a second book—on Whooping Cranes. A second book on cranes would be as daunting and time-consuming as the first, he knew, and for a long time he was on the fence.

Then one day he sat in a photography blind on the Platte River, surrounded by thousands of migrating Sandhill Cranes gabbling in the pre-dawn dark. As sunlight crested the horizon and slowly spread across the water, a lone whooper “rose up towering above the sandhills and stretched her massive wings,” he recalls. “That was the spark moment, the sign, whatever we want to call it, and the picture. I knew with that photograph I could do this book.”

The photo, Forsberg says, “was intimate, contained the spirit of the narrative—a mythical bird, almost lost to history.” 

That is when he decided to commit to his most recent book, Into Whooperland, published in 2024. To document the life cycle of these magnificent birds for his book, Forsberg traveled nearly 50,000 miles and amassed more than 100,000 photos. He has watched as parents taught their chick how to navigate a headwind, as adults chased off deer and coyotes, as chicks emerged from their eggs, and as parents stabbed fish and dissected crabs to feed young. He has photographed the remains of whoopers shot by poachers. He spent eight stifling days in a one-person photography blind watching and photographing whooper parents incubating eggs.

And riding along in a single-engine prop plane, he flew the entirety of the cranes’ 2,500-mile migration route to document the industrial, residential, and agricultural development threatening the birds’ migratory habitat. The point Forsberg wanted to dramatize: The “Whooper Highway,” as he calls it, is a formidable journey for this group of endangered birds, made more so by the expansion of agriculture and industry, the spread of cities, the drainage and cultivation of wetlands, and drought and climate change.

At the heart of Forsberg’s endeavor and his book is this question: “Can Whooping Cranes survive us and our 21st-century world?”

The Whooper Highway

Whooping Cranes once flew across the belly of North America by the thousands. Scientists estimate as many as 10,000 to 20,000 Whooping Cranes once lived on the continent. Some were nonmigratory, living largely in the coastal plains and wetlands of the American Southeast. Many others only wintered along the Gulf Coast and migrated to nesting grounds in the north-central United States and even farther north to the boreal forests of Canada.

This species that once wintered and nested across a broad swath of southeastern and central North America dwindled because of the plowing and drainage of prairie wetlands, and the wholesale slaughter of birds by commercial plume hunters in the early 20th century. By the 1940s, this tallest of American birds (standing about 5 feet) also had become one of the rarest: just 21 whoopers survived. A few birds lived year-round in coastal Louisiana; about 15 more were in a migratory flock, making an ancestral twice-a-year journey between Texas and Canada.

Various federal laws, bit by bit, protected cranes. The Lacey Act of 1900 regulated the sale of wildlife products. The Migratory Bird Conservation Act of 1929 set the stage for the purchase of land to create national wildlife refuges. Aransas National Wildlife Refuge was established in 1937, protecting the wintering ground of that last remaining migratory flock of Whooping Cranes. The federal Endangered Species Preservation Act of 1966 and the federal Endangered Species Act of 1973 created the framework for protecting rare wildlife species; Whooping Cranes were among the first species on the list for protection.

In 1966 the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service started the first successful Whooping Crane captive breeding program at Patuxent Wildlife Research Center, releasing the first birds into the wild in 1975. The federal program ended in 2017, but the International Crane Foundation and other groups continue the work today. In 1994, a nonprofit group called Operation Migration began training Whooping Crane chicks to follow ultralight aircraft to learn to migrate between Wisconsin and Florida. 

Through these and other efforts, whooper numbers rose to more than 800 wild and captive cranes, including a nonmigratory flock of about 80 birds in Louisiana, a group of about five that live in Florida year-round, and the reintroduced group of about 80 whoopers in the Wisconsin–Florida migratory flock. 

And then there’s the original surviving flock—the only self-sustaining group, numbering about 540—that flies each year between Aransas National Wildlife Refuge on the Texas coast and the vast wetlands of Wood Buffalo National Park in Canada, straddling the Alberta–Northwest Territories border.

As a result of increasing crane numbers, Forsberg has been able to see—and photograph—sights that would have been impossible decades ago. In a single year, he has seen more than 200 whoopers. Once, as Forsberg watched a group of 23 Whooping Cranes on a river, he says he thought to himself: “There were more birds in the frame than there were on this planet in the 1940s.”

As the cranes fly from their southern wintering area to northern nesting grounds, Forsberg realized there was a dramatic story to be told in between. The very existence of this small population depends on a 2,500-mile ancestral migration route that is now a constricting gauntlet of burgeoning cities and suburbs, drained wetlands, and industrial-scale farming.

“We’ve heard about [Whooping Cranes] at the nest before. We’ve heard about them on the Gulf Coast in Texas before. The story that was absent, that’s the story in the middle,” Forsberg says. “These birds are nomads. They spend a third of their lives each year on migration. … How do they go? Where do they stop? Who decides? … All of those questions are starting to be answered through science, through the science of telemetry.”

In 2008 the Whooping Crane Tracking Partnership was formed, comprised of the Canadian Wildlife Service, Crane Trust, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Platte River Recovery Implementation Program (a federal-state partnership to better manage the river), and U.S. Geological Survey, with support from the Gulf Coast Bird Observatory, International Crane Foundation, and Parks Canada. Scientists began outfitting wild cranes with trackers with Global Positioning System capabilities to learn where they fly, how high they fly, and when they stop. In areas with numerous cell-phone towers to receive and transmit data whenever cranes fly within range, the information comes in nearly in real time. It’s an intimate look at the birds’ migration, never before available. Since 2009, 190 cranes from the Aransas–Wood Buffalo flock have been fitted with the devices.

“We can utilize the telemetry as a tool to show the paths. Let’s have that experience,” says Forsberg, as he talks about the concept for his book. The ordeal and perils of their migration would surely be a major theme. Forsberg recognized that the only way to impress on people the danger that these birds endure on their migrations was to make the trip himself: “I wanted to fly with these birds on what I call the Whooper Highway, moving up north to their nesting grounds using telemetry in cooperation with the Tracking Partnership.”

So he recruited his friend Chris Boyer, a pilot from Bozeman, Montana, to give him a lift. They planned the trip for more than a year. As the time drew closer, they fitted Boyer’s bright red 1957 Cessna single-engine propeller plane with GoPro cameras on the struts, inside the cockpit, and on the tail. A time-lapse camera aimed straight down from the plane’s belly.

“What I wanted to do,” says Forsberg, “is to see the land as the crane sees it.”

Following the Church Family

For the sake of telling a better story, Forsberg decided to try to follow a few birds he knew really well, from photographing them over the years.

“There’s a bird named Husker Red that’s in the book. There’s a bird named Brutus, the first capture that I was a part of,” he says. And then there was the “Church Family,” a female with an active transmitter and her mate and chick—whoopers that he had first photographed in a wetland pool near the reflected image of St. Joseph’s Roman Catholic Church, near the village of Marcelin on the Saskatchewan prairie.

Forsberg and Boyer lifted off April 2, 2022, from an airstrip in Rockport, Texas, just south of Aransas National Wildlife Refuge. It was 77° Fahrenheit. On the cranes’ nesting grounds in Canada’s Northwest Territories, it was 11°F with –2°F wind chill. 

The migration had begun early that year. Half the flock had already left the refuge along the Gulf Coast and, according to telemetry, were strung out in a long line stretching northward as far as North Dakota.

The Cessna banked east, over Aransas’s Blackjack Peninsula and across San Antonio Bay to Welder Flats, a prairie and coastal saltmarsh where the Church Family had wintered. As the men headed north, skirting the western suburbs of Fort Worth, the prairies and wetlands of the coast gave way to towns, roads, and vast agricultural fields—the beginning of “one of the largest industrial agricultural enterprises ever to be seen on the face of the Earth,” says Forsberg. The birds’ migration carries them over what is broadly called the mixed-grass prairie, a region of lush grass, fertile soils, prairie streams, prairie potholes, and occasional vast wetlands. A region of such richness did not escape the attention of early settlers and more recent farmers. Millions of acres have been plowed, drained, and planted to corn, soybeans, sorghum, wheat, and other crops. 

“It’s one of the most transformed landscapes in the entire world. It has been for over 100 years,” he says. The patchwork of small wetlands that still exist are crucial to the continued existence of the Whooping Crane. “What’s left today is critical, and what’s left today is not enough.” 

Forsberg says that whether people realize it or not, these wetlands are crucial to humans as well: “What’s good for these birds is good for us in these rural communities,” he says, “because we all need enough water, and we need it clean to drink, we need all the things that these healthy landscapes can provide for us. 

“What’s good for wildlife, is good for humanity.”

The Church Family was already several days ahead of them. Following the telemetry reports of data downloaded whenever the cranes flew within range of a cell tower, the Cessna flew over the places where the Church Family had stopped or roosted: a river bend, a reservoir, even a sewage treatment plant. 

“What I wanted to do is to see the land as the crane sees it. We flew [the Cessna] at altitudes of 1,000 to 3,000 feet above ground. We traveled roughly 200 to 300 miles a day,” Forsberg says. “Every day, we were making decisions about if we could fly, and if we could, how far we were going to go, where we were going to get fuel, where we were going to sleep. We were making the same decisions as these birds.”

They flew high around the perimeter of Salt Plains National Wildlife Refuge in Oklahoma, a critical stopover spot for any water-dependent birds navigating the plains of the Central Flyway, and a popular roosting spot for Whooping Cranes. Then the Cessna found its own roosting site at the Anthony Municipal Airport in nearby Anthony, Kansas.

Corn and beans

Forsberg and Boyer picked up the trail again the next morning. Following the Whooper Highway through central Kansas, they flew over more stopover spots critical to the cranes’ migration, including Quivira National Wildlife Refuge, a rare inland saltmarsh and sand prairie, and Cheyenne Bottoms Wildlife Area. Both wildlife areas are listed as Wetlands of International Importance under the Ramsar Convention.

They continued northward over a landscape of immense rectangular corn and bean fields, broken occasionally by jagged paths of creek bottoms. As the plane reached the Platte River, it turned and followed the river east for 40 miles. The Platte once flowed over a broad floodplain and expansive series of shallow channels. Now it has been dammed in places and water is parceled out to maintain the braided channels that provide migratory stopover habitat for Sandhill and Whooping Cranes. The 80-mile Big Bend Reach is one of the most notable spots on the Central Flyway, a gathering place for more than 10 million birds of about 300 species (including a few whoopers) between mid-February and early May. It is renowned as a spot to see and photograph up to a half million resting Sandhill Cranes that stage for a migration that may carry them as far away as eastern Siberia. 

At the end of the day, the men landed at Hastings, Nebraska, where they were grounded by high winds for five days. So were many of the birds along the route.

“We waited like the birds,” says Forsberg.

The Church Family, too, was grounded—a bit farther north in prairie wetlands near Kimball, South Dakota. Just to the north, a blizzard pelted North Dakota with 50-mile-an-hour winds and snowdrifts as deep as six feet. 

When the winds finally eased, Forsberg and Boyer flew downstream along the Platte, where they spotted two whoopers in a wide channel near the Shelton bridge. They angled north and traversed the Nebraska Sandhills, at 20,000 square miles one of the world’s largest intact grasslands. The Sandhills sit atop the huge Ogallala Aquifer, which supports the agriculture of the Central Plains and also feeds prairie rivers and wetlands.

They crossed the swift and winding Niobrara River into South Dakota and finally caught up with the Church Family in a region of lakes and wetlands. The family of three cranes—two parents and a colt—stood all next to one another near a muskrat house along the wetland shore.

Confronting the “snow line”

Forsberg and Boyer spent the night in Kimball, before heading north again the next morning. But as they followed the Missouri River, they soon confronted the “snow line,” the abrupt edge of a blanket of white where the blizzard had passed. The cold left sheets of ice on the river as large as football fields.

They set down in Bismarck, North Dakota, and waited another day before following the Missouri again, north over Upper Souris National Wildlife Refuge and then across the border with Canada. The weather was not yet done with them: Boyer climbed rapidly to the highest altitude of their trip, to surmount clouds and turbulence, before descending to the Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, airport—where they were again grounded by high winds, this time for five days. 

Telemetry showed the Church Family continued to rest south of Kimball in South Dakota. But other whoopers had broken through the bad weather, climbing over the winds and winging toward their nesting grounds. A bird designated by the Tracking Partnership scientists as 12E (an alphanumeric code based on where and when the crane was captured) was leading the flock, now within a day of Wood Buffalo National Park.

When they were finally able to fly again, Forsberg and Boyer spent a day crossing the northern fringes of the Canadian prairie into the vast boreal forest. Gradually the multicolored patchwork of farm fields disappeared. Below them, the forest stretched to the horizon, still covered in snow, the wetlands still frozen. They spent the night in Fort McMurray, Alberta, before flying north again along the Athabasca River. 

As they lifted off from Fort McMurray and gained altitude, a thick yellow haze enveloped the plane. They could taste the acrid air. They were flying over the world’s largest open-pit mining operations—the so-called tar sands surrounding Fort McKay. It is one of the world’s largest deposits of petroleum, but also one that requires perhaps the most excavation and destruction to exploit, and emits vast amounts of greenhouse gases to produce. The excavation of the tar sands stretched beneath them in all directions. As Forsberg noted, “From 1,500 feet up, we could spin 360 degrees and see nothing but industry.”

After an hour, they finally emerged again into clear air. Now, no more mining, no roads—just wilderness wetlands and boreal forest until they crossed the Slave River and set down in Fort Smith, Northwest Territories, on the northeast edge of Wood Buffalo National Park. It was April 25.

“We traveled 18 days, 3,100 miles. We had eight overnight stops, shot 32,000 photographs,” says Forsberg. “We only saw Whooping Cranes four times, but it was quite a journey.”

Formidable challenge

Forsberg’s trip emphasized the challenges and dangers of migration across a landscape pervasively remade by humans. The journey dramatized the imperative for birds to have places to hold over and rest, primarily wetlands and shallow lakes and rivers with food, low banks, and long open views so they can watch for predators.

These sites have become fewer, making the places that remain ever more critical, as Whooping Cranes are crowded into the few small places that remain. In drought, their options shrink further. Then they are more at risk from catastrophic weather, or diseases like the highly pathogenic avian influenza that spreads where birds are concentrated. Wherever the route passes towns, cities, and other human development, the whoopers are endangered by power lines, wind farms, and even poachers.

“Most of what we know about Whooping Cranes from studies conducted over the years relates to what Whooping Cranes do on those two ends of the migration corridor, in Canada and in Texas,” says Mark Bidwell, wildlife biologist and crane expert with the Canadian Wildlife Service. “But recently, we’ve been trying to find out more about what the birds do in the middle during migration.” That work has been enhanced by the use of tracking devices.

Bidwell says that scientists previously thought migration was the time of highest mortality for Whooping Cranes.

“We’ve actually shown that that’s not entirely true,” he says. “We don’t actually see a disproportionate number of cranes perishing during migration.”

But there are growing dangers to cranes during migration. Temperatures in Canada are warming, and Bidwell says whoopers are spending less time on the wintering grounds and more time along their migration route in inland Texas and even farther north in the Southern Plains. That, he says, “brings them in contact with people more often,” with dangers ranging from illegal shooting to flying into power lines.

Drought, exacerbated by climate change, may also be shrinking the areas suitable for stopovers during migration.

Fortunately, Bidwell says, research has shown that Whooping Cranes are “impressively adaptable, and they can change where they go during drought.” He has seen cranes shift from protected natural wetlands to private wetlands and natural and manmade lakes. The key, Bidwell says, is to protect a variety of habitats, so whoopers can be assured of finding safe harbors regardless of the conditions they face.

“I think there’s a lot of evidence for that,” Bidwell says.

“These birds have become their birds now”

Unfortunately, says Forsberg, the loss of vital grasslands and wetlands is outpacing the acreage that is protected and restored along the migration corridor. According to a recent U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service report, wetland loss rates have accelerated by 50% within the past decade. 

Forsberg saw the ubiquitous evidence of human activity as he flew above in the Cessna. 

“It was very rare that there was ever a photograph that didn’t have us in the photograph, meaning the human footprint, across a whole 2,500 miles that includes getting up into the boreal forest,” he says. “It wasn’t until we really got past the tar sands that we finally were in wilderness.”

Nonetheless, Forsberg says he is hopeful, and his hope is driven by the changes he has seen firsthand in how people think about cranes—a change he witnessed in the community where his family lives and farms. 

“My dad was born and raised in Kearney, Nebraska, which is on the central Platte. Most of my relations on my dad’s side are all farmers south of the Platte who could give a lick about cranes,” he says. “These are corn and soybean farmers that have raised beautiful families and love what they do and care passionately about the lifestyle that they have. Cranes weren’t really on their radar.” 

But this past spring, the tiny farming town of Funk, located 14 miles south of the Platte River, held its second annual Crepes and Cranes pancake feed in the Funk School Community Center. The featured speaker: wildlife photographer Michael Forsberg.

“If somebody would have told me five years ago that they were going to be having a festival around cranes in Funk, Nebraska, I’d have laughed them right out of the room,” Forsberg says. “Over 100 people showed up—and there’s 170 people in Funk.”

“These birds have become their birds now,” he says. “And if that can happen in other places in rural America, particularly in the Great Plains where these birds migrate through twice a year, then I think they’ve got a future. 

“That’s really, really where my hope is.”