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ACADIA PARISH, La. (WAFB) - The radio receiver is tuned to a tiny transmitter on the leg of a whooping crane.

“Generally, the closer you get, the louder the signal is,” says Sara Zimorski.

Zimorski is a biologist with the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries. She oversees an effort to bring back the whooping crane to the state. Riding along the edge of a crawfish farm in southern Acadia Parish, Zimorski shows me a nest and she spots the large white birds in the distance.

“She is L 1015, the L is for Louisiana. 10 is, she was the 10th bird that we received in 2015, which is the year she hatched. So she’s nine years old this spring,” says Zimorski.

At five feet in height. The whooping crane is the tallest flying bird in North America. It has a wingspan of seven to eight feet. But these birds almost didn’t make it. In 1950, Louisiana lost its last whooping crane.

How close did we come to completely losing the whooping crane as a species?

“It almost seems like it’s a miracle that they did not go extinct, that we didn’t lose them. At one point, in the early 1940s, there were only 21 whooping cranes left in the wild,” Zimorski says.

To reintroduce the birds into the wild, eggs are hatched at the Audubon Institute in New Orleans. A few months after hatching, the adolescent birds are brought to the White Lake Wetlands Conservation Area in southwest Louisiana. Up to this point, all handlers wear white bird costumes, so the young whooping cranes don’t become dependent on humans. The birds get a colored tag and a tiny transmitter for tracking their movements. Zimorski took me to a second whooping crane nest in nearby Vermilion Parish. You can see the young chick following the parents as they search for food in the shallow water and grass.

“Those agricultural fields are basically managed like a shallow freshwater marsh, which is exactly what the cranes are looking for,” says Zimorski.

This reintroduction effort began in 2011. Since then, Louisiana’s wild whooping crane population has gone from zero to 80, and that doesn’t include the new chicks.

“We’re starting to see some pairs that are routinely successful at breeding, hatching, and raising chicks. And so that’s really exciting because that’s sort of the biggest thing that you have to have happening in every introduction to ultimately be successful,” Zimorski says.

It’s a process that takes patience since each pair of whooping cranes may only have one surviving chick each year. But with a little human help, these giant birds are slowly returning to their southwest Louisiana home.

More information about the Louisiana whooping cranes recovery and the breeding program at the Audubon Nature Institute can be found on Heart of Louisiana’s website.

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