Altogether, Patuxent Wildlife Research Center, ICF, and the Calgary Zoo produce about 30 whoopers each year for release into the wild, captive-bred Kissimmee Prairie flock in Florida. The Florida flock has about 60 nonmigrating whooping cranes. It sounds like raising whooping cranes is a lot of work. Yes, that's right. You see, different species of birds figure out migration in different ways.
Some birds migrate instinctively or use the stars to navigate their way south in winter.
But captive-bred whooping cranes don't grow up with wild parents, so they have no one to teach them to migrate. In 1997, biologist Kent Clegg successfully led a mixed group of whoopers and sandhill cranes about 800 miles south, from Idaho to New Mexico. The cranes migrated back north on their own in the spring. Bill Lishman, who inspired the Disney movie, Fly Away Home , did the same experiment leading sandhill cranes south to Virginia. These experiments are showing that if you teach cranes the way south, they can find their way home on their own.