Daughter Elsa and I intercepted three whoopers on fall migration along the Missouri River west of Yankton, SD, across from the Santee Sioux Reservation in Nebraska. It was my first introduction to “Lone Juv,” a nickname assigned to (W-BK-W), because he had been orphaned as a chick the previous year during fall migration. He wintered alone with sandhill cranes in central Kansas at Quivira NWR and along the Arkansas River. No one knows what happened to his parents, and no one was confident he would survive the winter in Kansas while the rest of the flock was in Texas. But he did.

Lone Juv was picked up by other whoopers on their migration north that spring. He made it to Canada’s Wood Buffalo National Park, where he spent the summer, and then migrated south with others. That’s when we saw him along the Missouri River with two other birds—very content to hunt and roost within the broad shoulders of the river, even with crowds of waterfowl hunters and boat blinds moving up and down.

Whoopers migrate south through waterfowl hunting seasons all the way to Texas. Later, I would spot Lone Juv again on his wintering grounds at Aransas in April 2022. I saw him from the air at the start of the Whooper Highway trip, on San Jose Island near Vinson Slough. He was one of the last birds with telemetry to leave the coast on migration in 2022.