Reporters are welcome.
From the large, open-air pens where they have spent the past two weeks, eight young whooping cranes survey their surroundings. The rural, central Florida landscape of open prairie, brush, and marshlands stretches away as far as the birds can see, though only a few tens of miles separate the Kissimmee release site from the metropolitan sprawl of Orlando. It is a humid March evening when the holding pen doors swing open for the first time. Though the cranes don't know it, this is a pivotal moment, one which marks the end of one life and the beginning of another. At first light the following morning, they will fly from the pen.