Ron Crete, circa 1977
Travels with Fam follows the migratory pathway of sandhill cranes from Minnesota and Wisconsin to their wintering grounds in Florida—a journey shaped by science, persistence, and an enduring friendship. In the late 1970s, wildlife biologists Ron Crete and John Toepfer were fascinated with sandhill cranes and determined to find out exactly what happened during their migration from the Upper Midwest to Florida and back.
In their early thirties, and in graduate school, they scrabbled together enough money to fund their work: a modest $6,000 grant from US Fish and Wildlife and a small grant from the university of Wisconsin-Steven’s Point. They supplemented this with their own funds. With sparse past reports to guide them, Ron and John fitted sandhill cranes with backpack transmitters, modified their cars to hold tracking antennas, and followed the cohort of 14 radio-marked birds more than 1,500 miles from Crex Meadows in Northwestern Wisconsin to their wintering areas in Florida.
What they accomplished (believed impossible by some) was extraordinarily rewarding for Ron and John and their supporters. They documented how far some cranes flew each day, where they stopped to roost and feed, precisely where 13 of the radioed cranes were found in wintering areas in Florida. They explored and reported about the tenuous relationship between wildlife management areas, sandhill cranes, and the farmers on whose fields the migratory sandhills foraged. Their report provided essential groundwork about Eastern Greater sandhill crane migration, their flyway, and the essential patchwork of marshlands that sustain them.
The winter issue of “The Passenger Pigeon,” the Wisconsin Society for Ornithology’s flagship publication, is presenting Crete and Toepfer’s 1978 research.
Ron’s stories about this trip are priceless. Some examples: a worried police officer south of Chicago stopped Ron as he was driving his antenna-laden car with a map on his steering wheel; in Tennessee they lost contact with the cranes and had to rent a plane to find them again; they had to communicate with each other while navigating cross-country in two cars tracking separate groups of cranes without cell phones or modern GPS technologies. Tracking migratory birds is much easier now, but perhaps less adventurous than Ron and John’s sojourn.
Now, nearly fifty years later, we are following that same migratory path. We’ll will seek out people who may have known these young researchers. We’ll talk with today’s scientists, volunteers, land managers, and advocates. And we’ll explore how conservation, habitat, and public understanding of sandhill cranes has changed since Ron and John took off on a wing and a prayer from Crex Meadows in November of 1977. Along the way, we’ll share photographs, stories, and discoveries, inviting you to imagine the remarkable journey that Fam and his Sandhill crane family may have experienced. We hope you’ll join us on this journey!
Marty Harding and Gary Noren, Co-authors of Fam
John Toepfers, circa 1977
Let me be among the first to congratulate you, my dear friends, and welcome you to the blog-o-sphere! Hope you find it as rewarding as I have these past 15 years at One Man’s Wonder.