I first got to know this particular family of whooping cranes during fieldwork on the Saskatchewan prairie in October 2021. The two adults and their four-month-old chick had just left their remote boreal nesting grounds in Wood Buffalo National Park and were on fall migration. The adult female had white–green–red bands on one leg and a telemetry device on the other.

Each night, I photographed them returning to the same area of the wetland roost, usually in line with the reflection of the 100-year-old steepled Catholic church in the nearby village of Marcelin. I dubbed them “The Church Family.”

Weeks later, I intercepted them again 1,200 miles south at Cheyenne Bottoms Wildlife Area in Kansas, and then again in February 2022 on their wintering grounds on private ranchland along the Texas Gulf Coast. There, the chick was captured by biologists and fitted with white–red–green leg bands and a telemetry unit, just like mom.

In April 2022, pilot Chris Boyer and I followed the telemetry tracks of the Church Family and 45 other whooping cranes north in a Cessna 172, flying what we coined “The Whooper Highway.” Over 18 days and 3,100 air miles, we only laid eyes on the Church Family once—stalled in central South Dakota by a historic blizzard. The rest of their story was told by telemetry data and animation.

In May 2022, I planned to embed in a blind on a whooping crane nest in Wood Buffalo, but a cold, wet winter had water levels near record highs. Mark Bidwell called me days before departure and canceled the plan—it wasn’t safe. Instead, I shipped up a custom timelapse camera that Jeff Dale of TRLcam and I had built, which was installed near the Church Family’s nest as part of a pilot remote-monitoring project.

I pivoted to Plan B: a nest in the Baraboo Hills of Wisconsin, where I had placed a blind with help from George Archibald and local landowners. I spent several days documenting that pair, but vegetation grew too tall just before the chick hatched. I missed the hatch and thought I had failed again—first in Wood Buffalo, now in Wisconsin.

I returned to Wood Buffalo in August 2022 to retrieve the nest camera by helicopter with the research crew. Eggshell fragments suggested two chicks had hatched.

On Halloween 2022, Elsa and I went on our annual birdwatching tradition and by sheer luck, 2H was passing through Nebraska, and her track was east of York heading south. We found her near sunset on a small NRD flood control reservoir with a whooper friend about an hour southeast of Lincoln. I went back the next morning to film them and then found them a few days later on a farm pond just outside of Cuba, Kansas.

Mike was present for Brutus’s first capture at Aransas National Wildlife Refuge. Once the researchers safely had Brutus in hand, they discovered an old yet troublesome injury. Dr. Barry Hartup treated his wounds, and Brutus later recovered and continued his migration north to Wood Buffalo.

That nesting season, researchers installed monitoring equipment at Brutus’s nest. The footage captured a black bear raiding the nest and devouring the eggs. Brutus did his best to defend the nest and aggressively disuade the bear, but was unsuccessful, and the nest ultimately failed.