July 24, 2025
Episode 20
Father Crane
George Archibald
For our final episode of the season, Mike sits down with Dr. George Archibald, the co-founder of the International Crane Foundation, a visionary conservationist, and a long-time friend.
Episode Extras
A Life “For the Cranes”
From the beginning, he had no interest in sports at all or typical “kid” activities. Instead, George raised all kinds of domestic birds, and even reared a few eggs from wild nests. He recalls earlier years on the coast going out with fishermen who dumped him off on the islands to study birds like eider ducks, common terns, herring gulls, black-backed gulls, cormorants, bald eagles, and kittiwakes, before being picked up again on the way home.
George was planning to be a medical doctor and thought birds would remain a hobby, but just one chance meeting with a Cornell ornithologist changed the trajectory in 1966. He left everything behind to study cranes.
Since then, George has travelled the world and has uplifted cranes for decades. Once, he even danced with a crane imprinted on humans to stimulate her reproductive cycle. She ultimately hatched a chick that went on to have 26 offspring of his own, and another 130 “grand-chicks.”
When asked what his parents thought about their son abandoning his future as a doctor all those years ago, George says they only congratulated him…
“They knew I was for the birds.”
Back to an Ornithologist
During a trip to Baraboo, Wisconsin in May 2021, Mike met up with George to find the County U Road whoopers.
George typically travels most of the year, raising funds and goodwill on behalf of ICF and cranes worldwide, but COVID had grounded his travels and given him the chance to return to his roots as a field ornithologist. He had been monitoring the pair’s daily behaviors with copious notes since they returned to the breeding grounds.
These birds were located 20 minutes from George’s farm, 10 minutes from the International Crane Foundation headquarters, and about 20 minutes from Aldo Leopold’s shack—the land where he wrote the now-famous Sand County Almanac nearly 80 years ago.
The Crane Family Tree…
Before modern genetics and DNA sequencing, early scientists studied the relationships between species through careful observation and comparison of physical characteristics. Comparative anatomy revealed similarities and differences of structures, indicating who was perhaps “closer” related, and who was more distant. Fossils and geography shed light on where species had come from and how they may have evolved particular traits for specific uses. Though initial studies of observable traits lacked the molecular evidence available today, they did introduce the foundation for understanding evolutionary relationships.
When George was at Cornell’s Lab of Ornithology, he repurposed an old mink farm 3 miles from the campus into a facility to house cranes for study. 15-20 smaller enclosures were created with ponds, and after several requests, 56 cranes representing eight species were sent by a collection of zoos to the facility. Studying these in depth and trips to additional zoos to study pairs not in the collection allowed George hundreds of hours of observation.
George ultimately conducted a comparative study of the behavior of cranes and was able to work out the relationships of all the different species of cranes to create a phylogenetic tree.
Thirty years later, Carey Krajewski from the University of Wisconsin drew blood from all 15 species of cranes at the International Crane Foundation and hybridized the DNA to map relations between species. This modern method created a new-angled look on the evolution of cranes and their relations.
George Archibald performed the first comprehensive analysis of cranes based on a coherent set of characters in 1975 & 1976.
This version of his proposed phylogenetic tree was cited in Krajewski’s work.
Carey Krajewski used a DNA-DNA hybridization method to look at the relationships of crane species to each other in 1989. The study looked into more specified “distances” from one species to another, but the simplified phylogenetic tree was quite comparable to George’s.
G. grus – Eurasian Crane (Eurasia)
G. nigricollis – black-necked crane (China, Bhutan, India)
G. monachus – hooded crane (East Asia)
G. japonensis – red-crowned crane (East Asia)
G. americana – whooping crane (North America)
G. canadensis – sandhill crane (North America, northeastern Siberia)
G. vipio – white-naped crane (Mongolia, northeastern China, southeastern Russia)
G. antigone – Sarus crane (India, Nepal, Pakistan, Vietnam, Australia)
G. rubicunda – brolga/Australian Crane (Australia, New Guinea)
G. leucogeranus – Siberian crane (Arctic Russia, China, Iran)
Bugeranus – wattled crane (sub-Saharan Africa)
A. virgo – demoiselle crane (central Eurasia)
A. paradisea – blue crane (southern Africa)
Balearica – crowned crane (eastern and southern Africa)
The Third Founder
George Archibald and Ron Sauey founded the International Crane Foundation in 1973 as two enthusiastic Cornell University graduate students and friends. Their most urgent goal at the time was to develop a species bank for the world’s 15 crane species as they were all considered threatened or endangered.
A lesser-known “third cofounder to ICF” in George’s words, is Forrest Hartmann. Forrest was a local lawyer at the time, and Ron and George met with him every Wednesday night at 7 p.m. in his office with whatever money they had scrounged up to pay bills from crane care.
Forrest not only helped the International Crane Foundation get it’s start– he also had a hand in helping the Aldo Leopold Foundation grow, and today contintues to raise money for The Nature Conservancy to purchase land for conservation in Wisconsin.
Passion for Forrest lies in bettering his community, uplifting appreciation for the arts, and protecting the environment. He is quoted, saying:
“Living comes from what you get, but life comes from what you give.”
photo from Wiscnews.com
Visit International Crane Foundation
See every species of crane in the world!
Episode 19: Cranes in Canada
Podcast Home