Today is the first day in about two weeks where the cranes have excellent migration conditions. Instead of headwinds from the north, the winds are blowing from the southeast at about 20 miles per hour. These tail winds, plus thermal currents resulting from temperatures in the 70s and partial sunshine, will make it easy for the cranes to make progress northwards, and could persuade some of the whooping cranes to leave today. Similar weather conditions are predicted all week, so I'll make a prediction that a majority of the whooping cranes will depart right on schedule the first two weeks in April. Our researcher doing studies of the blue crab population just completed three days of sampling at the end of March.
Blue crabs are the favorite food of the whooping cranes.
Unfortunately, blue crabs are still NOT plentiful in the marshes. The researcher spent three days walking transects through the marsh and only counted 20 crabs. When crabs are plentiful, one can usually find about one crab per minute of walking. So the cranes have definitely not been able to build up energy reserves needed for the migration, and especially for nesting. I really expect this to be a poor nesting year up in Canada because of the marginal food resources at Aransas this past winter.