INTO WHOOPERLAND

The big white bird is our harbinger of hope, a symbol of wildlife’s future in America. Over the past 70 years, we have vested our wildlife conscience into the well-being of the whooping crane (Grus americana). The whooper speaks to us as no other creature does. Elegant, spiritual, fleeting—the tallest American bird is among its most imperiled.

From the storied recovery of a few dozen whoopers in the 1940s to the daunting obstacles the species faces today, the whooper has won an extraordinary human effort to ensure its survival. It is today’s measure of mankind’s effort, ingenuity and commitment to creatures other than our own. Over time other species—the bison, the California condor, the dodo, passenger pigeon and bald eagle—have tested and spoken truths about the human animal. But today, no other creature better reflects Americans’ attitudes, attention and concerns toward nature than the beautiful whooping crane.

Over five years photographer and author Mike Forsberg immersed himself in whooperland—a universe of another kind and yet reliant on human care. He followed the last wild population, numbering some 540 birds, on their narrow, 2,500-mile Great Plains flyway from the Texas Gulf Coast to nesting grounds in remote boreal forests of Canada’s Northwest Territories.

From inside the whooper portal, Mike shares the birds’ saga in this remarkable book. He tells the extraordinary stories of tough, adaptive individual birds and families. He follows them by truck and small plane through wetlands, marshes and rivers. He finds them on the nest, hatching and protecting the young; dancing at sunrise in the marsh; braving nature’s blizzards and human callousness. And he explores the loose network of committed biologists, wildlife teams and volunteers who share their successes and failures in maintaining and restoring the species.

At every turn, Mike finds the birds’ essence in notes written in cramped blinds and with stunningly beautiful images, capturing cranes in their chosen places up and down the continent. Welcome to whooperland, a special world.

I offer you this testament of pictures and words, accompanied with a prayer that it does justice to them. As you navigate through the pages, imagine the sweep of time unfolding. And perhaps you will find the whooping cranes’ story entangled in your own in some meaningful way. Above all, my hope is when you hold this book in your hands, you feel something—anything. And that you will see these ancient white wonders, tallest of birds in North America and rarest of cranes in our world, as the beautiful beings they are. —Michael Forsberg