On the Whooper Highway

Join Mike Forsberg on a 3,000-mile, 23-day journey as he flies the migratory path of the whooping crane.

Begin the Journey

From Canada to Texas

Twice a year, whooping cranes migrate 2,500 miles from Canada’s Wood Buffalo National Park to Texas’s Aransas National Wildlife Refuge, navigating the highly altered Great Plains ecosystem. During this journey, whooping cranes seek water, food, and safe roosting spots in protected areas or unexpected refuges like farm ponds and wastewater treatment facilities while contending with extreme weather, industrial agriculture, and development.

Using telemetry data, Mike Forsberg and pilot Chris Boyer emulated this migration in Chris’s sassy red 1957 Cessna, facing similar challenges as the whoopers do, flying over 3,000 miles in 18 days.

THE Beginning

April 1

Headed south to go north today to follow the Whooper Highway. Jeff Dale picked me up at home at 9am and we had an easy drive to Dallas-Fort Worth where we landed for the evening next to the Texas Motor Speedway.

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STOP 2: Temple, Texas

April 7

We finally got off the coast today. When we left the airport, we first flew west and circled over Welder Flats where the Church family had spent their winter quarters, then pushed north following their track into a 40-mph headwind…

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STOP 3: Kansas

April 8th

Temple, Texas. Conditions sunny haze. Temps upper 40s.
800am to airport
855am take off.

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STOP 4: Nebraska

April 9

This morning we left Keim’s after a long goodbye then swapped timelapse camera cards at Salt Plains NWR half hour away. There sandhill cranes were kettling overhead and rafts of ducks and geese were on the water.

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STOP 5: South Dakota

April 15

We left from the Hastings airport around 9am, flew the Platte west to Kearney and along the way spotted two whoopers roosting on the river not far from Rowe Sanctuary near Gibbon.

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STOP 6: North Dakota

April 16

Jeff and I drove back to check on the whooper family at sunrise. We’ll meet Boyer at the airport late morning. As we drove into the wetland maze there were two sets of roosting sandhill cranes maybe 500 in one flock and 300 in another.

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STOP 7: Saskatoon

April 19

It is Emme’s birthday today. Twenty-two years old. Happy birthday Boo boo bear… We left Bismarck mid-morning after an oil change for the plane and a zoom call with ICF and Parks Canada folks about the SARA permit narrative I need to submit and have accepted to photograph whoopers at a nest later this spring.

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STOP 8: Fort McMurray

April 24

Finally on our way north today from Saskatoon to Ft McMurray under blue skies and fair weather. This flight took us from industrial agriculture to wilderness back to industry. This far north I couldn’t believe that the grid still laid out beneath us.

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STOP 9: Fort Smith

April 25

Just before we got in the plane this morning I had a flashback about how in these last three weeks we have traveled from coastal marshes to playas, up the ladder rungs of Great Plains rivers, over the prairie potholes, aspen parklands and now boreal forests and plains. It’s all surreal.

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Congratulations, Adventurer! You’ve successfully navigated the Whooper Highway with Mike!

We hope you enjoyed the experience. Don’t forget to explore the rest of our site for more exciting content, insights, and adventures waiting just for you. Dive in and discover what else we have to offer!

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The Beginning

April 1st

Headed south to go north today to follow the Whooper Highway. Jeff Dale picked me up at home at 9am and we had an easy drive to Dallas-Fort Worth where we landed for the evening next to the Texas Motor Speedway. On our way south we meandered a bit in Nebraska between Beatrice and Fairbury where Jeff spent part of his youth while his dad coached and taught at Fairbury High School. His eyes lit up as we talked about the local creek and the shaggy rumpled hills he used to explore, and the park in town that was his big backyard playground. He says he always goes this way when he heads south to drive down “memory lane”. He didn’t know as a kid that whoopers were migrating above him in the school yard.

Jeff’s truck is tricked out with technology like I have never seen before. It is like a spaceship. He has rolling WIFI, two cellular receivers plus antennas, two-way radios, GoPros and Sony RX0’s bow and stern, recording our travels. We are ready for almost anything with a plethora of tools and supplies stacked neatly in the hard sided shell and the rack on top. Jeff had the biggest grin on his face when he picked me up. He said he had been looking forward to this trip for a long time. So have I.

We followed Highway 81 south and eventually I-35. According to telemetry we passed within four miles of one whooper roosting on a small reservoir in northern Kansas but other than that they were either further west and north of us between central Kansas and South Dakota, or still south at Aransas. The storm system had locked them in place. I made half a dozen calls to check in with the folks around Rockport letting them know we are coming and on schedule. Pilot Chris Boyer is in Tucson, Arizona fixing a regulator on his plane but test flights today to the Mexican border proved positive so he’s confident he’ll be able to make the long haul to Rockport tomorrow, and through some amazing scenery.

Jeff and I hit a thunderstorm around Arbuckle, OK with a mix of rain, sleet, hail and lightning, but it was only a local cell and we drove out of it quickly, typical of spring weather cranking up here in the heart of tornado alley. As we moved further south, we drove out of the browns and into the greens, the wild plum and red buds were blooming, trees were bursting with spring. When we got to our motel we walked through the drive-thru at Popeye’s for a chicken sandwich and sat outside with a couple of Texas beers in 72 degrees and shirt sleeves. In the lobby of the motel two TVs were playing side by side - the one on the left was tuned to CNN. The one on the right was tuned to Fox News, pundits and prognosticators firing away. Between them was a long hallway with a west facing window glowing bright with the setting sun. How appropriate a metaphor – no doubt the truth lie somewhere in between. Cranes do not worry about such things.

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Roughly three hours later we landed in Temple, Texas to refuel and decided to stay put. Winds north of us were 50+ mph sustained all the way to Kansas so instead of making it to our planned destination of Wichita Falls 450 miles away, we only went 180 miles and Jeff traveling by truck was only a half hour behind us when we arrived at the FBO. That’s how slow we were in the air, and it was a bumpy ride not for the faint of heart nor stomach. Today I would’ve preferred the truck. Conditions look better for tomorrow, so we’ll make up some ground to Anthony, Kansas which was our Friday evening destination anyway – there we are staying with my old friends Derrick and Jackie Keim whose house is two miles from the local FBO and half hour from Salt Plains NWR in Oklahoma. I haven’t seen Derrick and Jackie since they moved family from a ranch in northwest Nebraska to a place in southern Kansas in 2006. Can’t wait to see them. It’s been too long for old friends.

910am first center pivot, next to the Brazos River.
922am first wind farm, five miles long end to end.
121pm Crossed the Red River, Texas-Oklahoma border.
220pm First patchwork of center pivots mining the Ogallala Aquifer, near Mountain View, OK
530pm Landed Jet, Oklahoma FBO for gas and met Derrick, with a wide-eyed grin, cowboy hat, purple pearl snap shirt and blue jeans. Then flew 10 minutes to Anthony, KS FBO and parked for the evening. Crazy to see them again. We picked up right where we left off in 2006, a sign of good friends. Steaks, beer, whiskey and conversation flowed easy with promise of “heaps” of bacon, sausage and coffee in the morning. The Keim’s are generous, good as gold, and still with an ornery streak.

Then back to the airplane headed north to Nebraska and the Crane Trust on the Platte River.
1130am Landed on grass strip at Stafford Kansas FBO and Jeff and I drove to swap TL camera cards at Quivira NWR. Together Salt Plains and Quivira are designated critical migratory habitat zones for whooping cranes. Two hours later we were back in airplane and pushed by a strong tailwind arrived to the Platte Valley late afternoon. We flew the the “big bend reach” of the Platte from Kearney to Grand Island before landing at the FBO in Hastings. The river is low water right now, more sand than water, but its braids are beautiful when backlit - they shine like liquid mercury.

We circled them twice to get a photo of these two white dots in the river’s sandy braids, then headed north following 5G’s track into the mighty Nebraska Sandhills, across the Loups that drain them, then the Niobrara, and eventually crossing the Missouri and its huge heaving shoulders, on our way to Pierre. But first we made a bee line to the large wetlands complex northeast of the Bijou Hills and south of Kimball, to meet up with 5G and reconnect the dots with the Church Family (12G, mate and nearly one year old chick 2H). It was 1pm when the wetlands first came into view and there was Jeff who had beat us by 30 minutes (and somehow that included him stopping for lunch), his truck parked on a county road with whoopers in view, including 5G. We met him at the grass strip airport at Kimball to re-group, then we went back up the air to try and find the Church family and get a good count of the flock. We found the Church family together foraging around a large muskrat hut along a wetland shoreline then counted the rest, 26 whoopers total, including a family with a set of twins. My heart nearly came out of my chest when we saw a big white bird laying prone below a powerline right next to the road. We met back at the Kimball grass strip and decided Jeff and I would ground truth the area for a while and try to photograph from the ground. Chris flew on to Pierre.

By 230pm we were driving a matrix of county roads in a couple mile area and saw small groups of whoopers feeding in the mix of wetlands, prairie pasture and old corn. The big white bird we saw from the air was a pelican not a whooper. It was dead and first thought it had clipped a power line or the top of the barbed wire fence that separated pastures and road between two wetlands. But then I saw another dead pelican in the wetland west and wonder if it’s avian influenza (bird flu) which is an issue this year.

At the intersection of two county roads a sign said, “Minimum Maintenance - Dead End”. So we took it and a half mile in we saw the family with twins again, loafing on a prairie hillside next to a wetland. One of the adults was laying down which I had seen sandhill cranes do on lazy afternoons like today soaking in the sun. But the other adult was up and the twins were loitering around the bird laying down, as if waiting. Then they walked down to the wetland to feed but the adult laying down stayed. I knew something was wrong. The family now at the wetland looked back at the remaining adult several times and eventually they walked then flew to the other side of the road in an upland to feed. Then the adult in the prairie finally tried to stand up and half of its leg was gone just below the hock, severed, and it was bleeding. The bird flapped its wings to try and keep balance to stand but only could do so for a few seconds before falling to the ground. What happened??!! This had to be the same family we saw from the air in fine shape as we flew in, roughly in the same area. We stayed and watched the bird until around 6pm. The family flew back to it at one point, stood around it a long while again as if waiting, then eventually flew off again this time to the west to feed before sundown. We had to leave too and Jeff and I made it to Pierre after sundown and reconnected with Chris and a late supper. But I can’t take my mind off those birds and what we’ll see tomorrow. We have to keep moving north but all I want to do is stay here and see the fate of this whooper family through.

in one of the flocks there were also a half dozen whooping cranes. We eventually found the family with twins roosting on a wetland by themselves south of the hillside where we had left them last evening, and miraculously the injured adult was with them. He was on a point of sand near the roosting family, laying down. When they moved, he stood back up and looked stronger on his one leg – flew 20-30 yards to grass upland knob, but then laid back down. We watched him for an hour and half. The family would forage then come back to him. Juveniles cavorted around pasture with sandhills and other whoopers loitering nearby. The other adult of the mated pair mostly stood by him, once in awhile glancing over at the chicks.

Last evening from Pierre, I called Dave Brandt who got ahold of USFWS officer Chris Magner based in Madison, SD who in turn called me, said he was coming out to check on and monitor the bird (about a two-hour drive). I gave him the location info and the description of what we saw this morning (along with video and a couple pictures with arrows on them to show location) and said he was on his way. Before we left Jeff and I put eyes on and accounted for all the other whoopers we know including Church family and 5G, then reluctantly left to get moving north to Bismarck. Text and email conversations continued throughout the day between Magner, his boss Eric, Dave Brandt, and vet Barry Hartrup at ICF to watch, consider and hold out hope for the injured bird. It’s Easter Sunday tomorrow. Why could one not hope? I’ve said many prayers. We arrived in Bismarck around 5pm and during the last hour along Missouri flew right over marked bird 11G and several other whoopers in McClean Bottoms area, a popular local birding spot that caused quite a stir on E-Bird with photos posted of 8-10 whoopers in heavy snows (2feet+) here just a few days ago. In the photos, one particular picture even captured YAY, the old female that returns every winter to Al and Diane Johnson’s place on the Lamar Peninsula!

We had a conversation with plane mechanic at Bismarck Exec Air Aviation, a young guy in his late 20s early 30s, who said he grew up on a ranch just across the border in Montana, and they would have sandhill cranes come into their big garage and make their rattling calls because he thought they liked the echo. Drove his dogs crazy. Then he said he and his wife saw four whoopers in flight low across the road just a few days ago near their home in Mandan, ND. More connections…

We had crossed the snow line around the SD/ND border with a lot of questions about these birds and their hardiness, although it might be folly to question their choices or their hardiness now. We checked into a motel long enough to throw bags in a room then raced out to Mclean Bottoms WMA half hour outside of town in Jeff’s truck and parked at the drifted in gate. We saw whoopers flying off the river as we were pulling in headed to hilltop crop fields to the north to feed. There was a group of six, a group of four, and two still out on the ice maybe half mile away. We hiked around the site about half hour following whooper tracks in the snow as big as my hands, fresh from the day.

Once in the air we encountered ice fog halfway to Crosby our intended fuel stop so diverted east an hour to Minot instead. We waited a couple hours there for weather to clear up, then back tracked to Crosby whose FBO had 10–12-foot drifts piled next to the building and runway, then headed north again. We flew over the Upper Souris NWR where we knew there was a telemetry bird and spotted 3 whoopers and thousands of light and dark gees on ice. From there the landscape unfolded below like a big white pillowtop blanket of snow 3-4 foot deep and no doubt much deeper in the drifts. With snow on the prairies the details in the land became a white slate and what remained evident was the way we have organized ourselves and live on a big grid of roads and powerlines, fields and pivots, homesteads and windbreaks, agriculture, energy development. As we migrate north the farms are becoming fewer and fewer and the grid is stretching from squares into rectangles. The landscape is stretching too, the ladder rungs of northern Plains rivers like the Missouri, Qu’ Appelle and their drainages we are flying over are bigger, the scale larger, their shoulders broader. And as we flew over the 40th parallel crossing into Canada, kettling higher and higher through a line of broken clouds to find more stable air, the expanse of the prairie potholes below became evident – hundreds and hundreds in a view like a shotgun blast, thousands along our path to Saskatoon.

We made it to Saskatoon airport without incident and no hassles with the customs officials. And Jeff made it too literally arriving just as we were landing at the FBO. Amazing. We’ll be in Saskatoon a few days now prepping for the last stage of our journey and checking on two timelapse cameras within an hour of here. There is less snow in the prairie provinces now and temps are milder. We left the snow belt about 100 miles south of here.

We saw row crops and hayfields, cattle, oil and gas, pipelines utility power lines, seismic modeling grids, oil production facilities, and mining. We also saw the transition from remnant grasslands on the northern edge of the Great Pains to the aspen parklands and spruce bog forests and eventually boreal forest. Once over the North Saskatchewan River, it was a landscape increasingly full of water. It is warmer up here and less snow than the Dakotas, but they had their own late winter blast here of nearly 2 feet in 2 days that has all but melted now. From our view above it is a land of water where beavers rule. There is a beaver lodge on nearly every pond, and in most cases two and on opposite ends. I can see all the oxbows defined in a winding riparian corridor because they are still frozen, but the main channels are flowing freely now. It is hard to see wildlife from 2000 ft, but we did spot a small flock of sandhill cranes in flight, what looked like a band of elk or maybe moose, and a ragged line of white pelicans we thought at first were whoopers…

As we lifted out of Fort McMurray we immediately were in the Alberta tar sands, one of the largest industrial extraction zones in the world, so large in fact you can see it from space. From a plane flying at 1500 feet, it’s footprint stretched horizon to horizon. I got a sense of it yesterday, but the scale today is overwhelming. Paid aerial tours of the tar sands are common here to show off the level of industry, but what one person may see as progress and ingenuity, I see as huge open wounds in the earth, along with spoiled rivers, wetlands and forests and any life that suffers from the consequences downstream. Roads, pipelines, transmission lines, seismic lines all reach out from its core either in the service of delivering energy or searching for more. And on a day with cold temps aloft but little wind, a thick, eye-watering yellow haze hangs like a blanket over it all. I had to shoot photos with the window closed. It was Mordor. It also is the key driver of the region’s economy. “It’s the eggs that must be broken for our luxurious omelets” Boyer said. And something he’d write in an Instagram post later.

As we press north, we escaped down the Athabasca River into trackless wilderness, and the tortured landscape and its scales began to fall away, I opened back up the window. Soon the land was itself again and we were passing over Lake Claire and the Peace- Athabasca River Delta, the continent’s largest freshwater delta, and for whoopers, their last stop before reaching their remote nesting grounds in Wood Buffalo. Then, just after crossing the 60th Parallel there was the Slave River, the community of Fort Smith, NWT and the airport. We had made it. This last flight on the whooper highway took us less than three hours.