Wisconsin Bill would allow hunting of a rare crane

In Wisconsin, a place where word of dwindling numbers of sandhill cranes set off elaborate conservation efforts decades ago, the birds — elegant, prehistoric-looking creatures that bugle hauntingly — are once more at the center of discussion among state leaders. This time, a member of the State Assembly wants to allow cranes to be hunted. For some among the scores of volunteers who wake up before dawn on a chilly spring day each year to watch the skies for cranes as part of an Annual Midwest Crane Count, organized by the Wisconsin-based International Crane Foundation, the notion seems unthinkable. But some farmers said they desperately need a reprieve from the cranes that, they complain, eat acres and acres of newly seeded cornfields. “The good thing is that there’s been a recovery here in the population of sandhill cranes,” said Paul Zimmerman, a lobbyist for the Wisconsin Farm Bureau Federation. “But when it gets to be too much of a good thing, it’s a problem.” While Wisconsin’s sandhill crane population dipped to low levels in the 1930s, partly because of hunting, these cranes seem now to be flourishing. More than 600,000 exist worldwide, said Kent Van Horn, a migratory game bird ecologist from the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, and an estimated 72,000 — more than double the estimate from a decade ago — live along the migratory path that runs from states like Wisconsin down to the Southeastern United States. More than a dozen states, most of them in the West, already allow hunting of sandhill cranes. Even as Kentucky ended its first sandhill crane hunting season last month, more states were said to be weighing the idea. Some hunters described the sandhill crane as having a surprisingly rich flavor, akin, they said, to pork chops. Still, in a place like Wisconsin, rich both in traditions of hunting and bird-watching, this is complicated territory. This is, after all, a state that battled for years over whether to hunt mourning doves (ultimately allowed) and that is already preparing for a fight over whether wolves, newly removed from endangered status in the region, should now be hunted. Advocates of the crane hunting legislation, introduced on Wednesday by State Representative Joel Kleefisch, emphasized that it would allow officials to limit the number of cranes harvested and would require hunters to complete an education course. Officials from the International Crane Foundation said they were maintaining a neutral stance because the foundation views itself as a conservation group focused on scientific research about cranes and their ecosystems, not on politics. But Peter Cannon, president of the Madison Audubon Society, said he feared that the extremely rare whooping crane might be mistaken for a sandhill crane during a hunt, and he said that farmers could use chemicals, distasteful to cranes, on corn. Mark Berres, an assistant professor of avian biology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said that even with a growing number of sandhill cranes, far more needed to be studied about their genetic diversity and fledgling rates, adding, “I can’t understand how you’re going to open up a hunting season before you learn more.”