The Man Who Saved the Whooping Crane: The Robert Porter Allen Story [Kindle Edition]

When I was a kid growing up in Corpus Christi, Texas, a common destination for weekend camping was the nearby Aransas Wildlife Refuge, winter home of the majestic whooping cranes. When I went to the World Scout Jamboree in Alberta, Canada, our troop flag featured a whooping crane, depicting the whooper's migratory path from south Texas to western Canada. One of the rarest birds in North America, the whooping cranes were nearly extinct, and still are endangered. They owe what existence they have, in large part, to the efforts of ornithologist Robert Porter Allen.

Even if you are not a bird lover or nature lover, and even if you think the environmentalist movement is a bit wacko, you will enjoy Kathleen Kaska's telling of Bob Allen's story. As an Audobon Society naturalist, who had studied roseate spoonbills and flamingos, tracking their migration and identifying their nesting grounds, he was the perfect candidate to save the whooping crane.

The whooping cranes' winter home on the Texas Gulf Coast was well-known. The federal government established the Aransas Wildlife Refuge in 1937 to protect the cranes' habitat and diet from hunting, fishing, and development. But their northern nesting sites remained a mystery for many years. Allen and his colleagues spent many summers scouring remote areas of the Canadian wilderness before they finally discovered where the whooping cranes summered.

Bird watching, stereotypically a rather dull pursuit, may not seem like material ripe for an engaging story. Allen himself acknowledged that "a casual but undeviating perseverance and ability to drink gallons of strong coffee can be reckoned among the filed ornithologist's most valuable assets." Kaska takes her readers far beyond Allen's long days of sitting motionless observing his birds, giving a sense of adventure and suspense to his long struggle to save the whooping cranes, and instilling in the reader a sense of his love and admiration for these rare birds.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the complimentary electronic review copy.

The Man Who Saved the Whooping Crane is a well-written and enjoyable book about the life of a man who gave so much of himself to make a difference in the world of birds. It's not just a biography; it's an adventure story that takes the reader all over North America. In writing about Robert Porter Allen's life and accomplishments, Kaska also gives a historical insight into the National Audubon Society, which I found just as fascinating as the story of saving the whooping cranes.

The Man Who Saved the Whooping Crane: The Robert Porter Allen Story is a wonderful tale about an orinthologist who was assigned the seemingly impossible task of locating the last nesting side of the endangered whooping crane before the species disappeared. I'm not an avid birder, but this story captivated me. It tells of the struggles and dedication of Bob Allen, who in the 1940s set out into the Canadian wilderness to look for what amounts to a needle in a haystack. It was literally a race against time because there were only 15 whooping cranes left in the wild. But the book is more than just a story about saving an endangered species, Kaska also writes about Allen's personal struggles in balancing his work with his family life. For anyone who enjoys stories about unsung heros and adventure, this is the book for you. In the last part of the book, Kaska writes about the organization called Operation Migration, which is attempting to establish another wild flock of whooping cranes in the eastern United States. The founders of the organization were the inspiration behind the movie Fly Away Home. The stores about the young whooping cranes and what is involved in training them to follow lutralight planes had me laughing one minute and crying the next. I now follow their story daily on Facebook.