Population ecologist collects migration data on whooping cranes with help of volunteers

Karine Gil arrived at the Platte River Whooping Crane Maintenance Trust office near Alda before sunrise Sunday.

As she stood in the swirling wind and spitting rain, she broke into a wide smile. This weather may be miserable, she said, but it's perfect for spotting whooping cranes.

"It's sad that we have to watch for them in conditions like this," Gil said. "But it's the only way."

This has been Gil's life for the past two weeks: Each morning she drives down a maze of gravel roads on the south side of the Platte River, stopping every few miles to watch for whooping cranes on their southward migration from Saskatchewan, Canada, to Texas.

If the conditions are right, she'll do it again in the afternoon. And much of the rest of her day is spent coordinating a few dozen volunteers, then organizing and analyzing the data she collects.

It's part of her effort to track every bit of information she can about the migrations of the 300 or so whooping cranes in North America.

She's beginning to develop some interesting hypotheses: that the cranes stop right on or near the Platte River during dry years but farther from the Platte River during wet ones, and that cranes stay longer on stopovers during poor weather.

But to test those ideas, she needs data. And to get data, she needs spotters.

She first saw that need when she worked to develop a model of long-distance North American migration while a doctoral student at Texas A&M University.

"We needed more information from Nebraska, from the center of the flyway," Gil said. "From here, we had that gap of information. And now, this is what we are doing -- filling that gap."

Since Gil arrived at the Platte River trust in January 2007, she has worked to resurrect the trust's Whooper Watch program, which had been mostly inactive since about 2002.

She's amassed at least 30 volunteers this fall who occasionally watch known whooping crane stopover spots in their area. If they're fortunate enough to see a whooping crane, they take photos, detail the crane's appearance and activity and send the information to the trust.

She's pleased with the growth of the program, but she'd love to have a larger army of watchers.

This year's whooping crane migration season began remarkably early. It typically begins in mid-October, peaking a couple of weeks later. But this year, Gil had her first reported sighting -- from a pilot flying northeast of Lake McConaughy -- on Sept. 23.

So a few dozen watchers may sound like a lot, but when they're looking for just 266 birds, plus an expected 39 chicks, during a three-week window over a geographical area that stretches from Phillips into the Panhandle, watching for whoopers can develop a needle-in-a-haystack feeling.

That scarcity of data can make research difficult. For example, even though Gil believes cranes stay here longer in bad weather, the area has more reported sightings in good weather -- probably because that's when people are willing to go out and watch.

Even the earlier migration may just be a function of closer whooper-watching.

"We don't know if there are different conditions or if we are now more alert and are watching for them earlier," Gil said.

On Sunday morning's watch, Gil found no cranes, but she still found the experience valuable.

Sometimes, collecting data on why cranes aren't stopping at a site can be as helpful as data on why they are.

In Sunday's case, she found that a normally heavily visited site on the Platte River southwest of Wood River had far too deep a river and too few sandbars this year for cranes to stop.

"We have to be walking in the fields and watching the same environments that the birds are watching from the sky," Gil said. "We have to think like the birds."