I started with a question. Was Galveston Bay ever whooping crane territory? And if it was, could it be again?
The first answer is in a grave. At Mitchell Ridge on Galveston Island, archaeologists recovered eleven whistles made from whooping crane wing bones. Each has a single air hole, plugged with asphaltum to shape the tone. Four are engraved with fine geometric lines. They were buried with people, in graves from the Late Prehistoric through the Early Historic period. No crane bones turned up in the camp refuse, among the fish and deer. The cranes probably were not dinner. Someone took the bone of a bird that calls across a marsh and made it call again.
Similar bird-bone whistles, some from whooping cranes and some from great herons, have turned up around Galveston Bay, in southeast Texas, and in southwest Louisiana. This was a regional tradition of making music from the coast's biggest wading birds.
The written record agrees. Nineteenth-century travelers described the whooping crane as a common winter visitor on the Texas coast. By 1900 it had largely vanished from that coast, except for one peninsula that became Aransas National Wildlife Refuge. In the winter of 1941, fifteen or sixteen migratory cranes wintered there. Every whooping crane alive today descends from them.
So the crane never left Texas. It was pushed out of most of it.
Today about 540 winter around Aransas, near the record of 557 the winter before. It is the largest wintering flock in the modern record, and still well under half of even the most conservative estimate of the mid-1800s. Nearly all of those birds are in one place.
Then there are the cranes that stay. In 2021, two pairs from Louisiana's reintroduced, non-migratory flock built nests in Jefferson and Chambers counties, the first documented nests in Texas since the late 1800s or early 1900s, depending on the source. Chambers County sits on the edge of the Galveston Bay complex. Both pairs nested twice. Neither raised a chick.
I can't point to a record of cranes living in the bay year-round, and I won't claim one. I can say this was crane country in winter, and that the habitat is not gone. A 2018 Christian Science Monitor report said enough protected land exists between Nueces Bay and Galveston Bay to support more than 1,000 cranes, nearly double today's wintering flock. The same report quoted a staff member at the International Crane Foundation's Texas office, who said the coast has already lost half its wetlands.
That is why the marsh is the story, not just the bird. A crane needs wetlands, blue crabs, and room.
Could the bay be crane territory again? I don't know. But it's worth asking about a coast that once held them.
What other birds are in the piece is the subject of the next post.
