Beginning in 2009, the Crane Trust scientists, in cooperation with the USGS Northern Prairie Wildlife Research Center, the US Fish and Wildlife Service, the Platte River Recovery Implementation Program, and the Canadian Wildlife Service with support from the Gulf Coast Bird Observatory, International Crane Foundation, and Parks Canada placed GPS transmitters on more than 60 whooping cranes in Canada and Texas. These transmitters provided us with as many as four locations for each bird per day. This allowed us to follow the cranes’ movement on their nearly 5,000 mile round trip between Wood Buffalo National Park and Aransas National Wildlife Refuge.

Data collection on this project was finished in 2016, and the task of analyzing hundreds of data points across the United States and Canada has begun. One paper, summarizing much of the data and evaluating the Platte River Recovery Implementation Program has been published as a USGS publication. Future research includes: whooping crane habitat on wintering grounds, the entire migratory flyway, and the summering grounds, juvenile whooping crane behavior and movement, and migration ecology as a whole. Stay tuned to our publications list and newsletter to get developments.