Pilot Chris Boyer, camera engineer Jeff Dale, and Mike took the journey of a lifetime in April 2022. They traveled 2,500 miles by plane and car the entire migratory route of whooping cranes, starting along the Gulf of Texas and ending just south of Wood Buffalo National Park. With permissions from the whooping crane telemetry partnership, they moved as the birds moved, leaving Texas in early April, navigating the Great Plains agriculture and energy grid, weather events, and Canadian tarsands, arriving in the Boreal Forest in northern Canada a month later.

In this episode, Chris discusses what it takes from a pilot’s perspective to make a trip like this possible. Jeff Dale discusses the nuances of timelapse and remote camera systems that they installed along their journey. Together, these three recount stories from their journey, which include eating at local dives, navigating extreme weather in the Dakotas, and encountering an injured whooping crane.

excerpt from mike’s journal

My first goal on this trip was to photograph the big-profile conservation challenges from the air for Liz Smith at the International Crane Foundation. The issues include rising sea levels, land development and encroachment, black mangrove invasion, and estuary habitat alteration for shipping channels. The list goes on.

The larger purpose was to fly the 2,500-mile “Whooper Highway” from the Texas Gulf Coast to Wood Buffalo National Park in Canada’s Northwest Territories in a Cessna. Chris Boyer of Kestrel Flight Services in Bozeman, Montana, was the pilot. Jeff Dale of TRLcam provided ground support, driving a truck loaded with supplies and communications gear. Alex Wiles, an International League of Conservation Photographers Associate Fellow, was the videographer. He had been hired for a week by Nebraska Public Media to document the first leg of our journey.

Wind was the biggest challenge between Texas and Nebraska. Blizzards became an issue farther north in the Dakotas—for both us and the birds. We made similar choices as the whoopers: how far to go, where to eat, when to get gas, and where to sleep. We were never truly out of the grid of humanity, industrial agriculture, and energy development—until near the end.

The tar sands extraction zone looks like Mordor. It sits just south of one of the wildest places left on the North American continent. When we flew into that wildness on the final day, Wood Buffalo was still locked in snow and ice.

Along the route, we checked all the timelapse cameras up the flyway and installed the last two in Wood Buffalo before returning home. We also shot a continuous “timelapse” of the flyway from the belly of the plane, using Chris’s skills as a survey pilot—he’s a great aerial photographer.

I met Ronnie Schaefer of the Salt River Tribe, who is considered the “keeper of the cranes,” and connected with members of the Parks Canada community—a melting pot of Salt River, Métis, Euro-Canadian, and other voices.

We followed the Church Family migration path for most of the first half of the trip to the Dakotas. In central South Dakota, we caught up with them—first from the air, then on the ground. There, we also found a pair of whoopers with rare twins. But in the brief period we were there, one of the adults suffered a traumatic injury: a mid-leg amputation. With their limb severed and bloodied, they struggled for the next few days and eventually died. The cause of injury was never confirmed, but it was likely the result of a trap. I shot both stills and video. A conservation officer documented the rest.