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Snowstorm damages whooping crane complex at Laurel wildlife center

Thursday, Feb. 16, 2006

A heavy snowstorm on Feb. 11 and 12 caused extensive damage to an endangered species complex at Laurel’s Patuxent Wildlife Research Center, and several of the birds kept there escaped.

Scientists at the center fear the damage to flight pens for whooping and sandhill cranes could impact the endangered birds’ breeding season. Whooping cranes were nearly extinct in the ’60s when Patuxent helped create the breeding program, and sandhill cranes are used as surrogate parents for the whoopers.

Patuxent’s breeding program provides two-thirds of the birds used to restore whooping cranes in North America.

The storm began with rains on Feb. 11 that soaked the fields and overheated the netting keeping the cranes in the complex’s 110 pens. After it changed to snow in the evening, the snow built up on the nets too quickly for technicians to keep them clear.

By 3 a.m., many of the nets had collapsed, and the center also lost power, forcing the technicians to struggle in the dark. And by 10 a.m., the final snowfall tally had reached 18 inches.

Of the 110 bird pens, only five were undamaged, and nine whooping cranes and nine sandhill cranes had escaped. The whoopers were recaptured by Feb. 13, but the sandhill cranes remain loose. The center reopened Feb. 16.

But the damage to the pens will have the most impact, the center said. Disruptions such as these in the midst of the breeding season, which already has begun, can lower egg production for the year. But the extent of the impact will not be fully known until spring.

Patuxent Wildlife Research Center is a founding member of the Whooping Crane Eastern Partnership, a consortium of government and private organizations working together to establish a new migratory flock of whooping cranes in the United States.