Crane Foundation hopes to help farmers stop crop damage by cranes while warning against hunting

The return of the sandhill crane to Wisconsin is a conservation success, but now the state needs to manage the population and the crop damage the birds can cause. (Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources)

The Baraboo-based International Crane Foundation is working to help farmers in Wisconsin and across the country ward off crop damage from sandhill cranes while warning that a hunting season of the birds — a goal of pro-hunting groups in the state for years — will do little to stop the problem.

At a sparsely attended meeting Thursday evening at the public library in Fort Atkinson, Anne Lacy, the foundation’s Director of Eastern Flyway Programs, touted the benefits of a chemical compound called Avipel that corn seed can be treated with to deter the birds from eating the seeds. Lacy said the compound has been proven to work for years, yet noted the remaining hurdle is getting the product into the hands of farmers and seed companies.

Sandhill cranes have been a regular topic among policy makers in Wisconsin in recent years. In 2021 musician Ted Nugent appeared at a press conference at the state Capitol to push a bill that would allow a hunting season of the birds, calling them “ ribeyes in the sky .” A similar bill was introduced in 2011.

This summer, a legislative study committee chaired by Rep. Paul Tittl is weighing policy options for managing the birds and addressing crop damage. At the meeting Thursday Lacy lamented that the first meeting of the committee focused entirely on hunting — an attempted solution she said wouldn’t solve the farmers’ problems.

She said that the calls for hunting the birds from pro-hunting interests like the Wisconsin Waterfowl Association are “using farmers to get what they want, a hunting season, and farmers would be left high and dry.”

At the study committee meeting earlier this month, retired Department of Natural Resources migratory game bird ecologist Kent Van Horn said that authorizing a hunt may be worthwhile but it wouldn’t solve the crop damage problem because by design it would be aimed at responsibly managing the crane population.

“It’s structured to be sustainable, so you’re not going to lower the population in Wisconsin by adding a hunting season,” Van Horn said to the committee.

The existence of sandhill cranes in Wisconsin is a conservation success story. Famed Wisconsin ecologist Aldo Leopold wrote about the birds in his 1948 “Marshland Elegy.” In the 1930s, only an estimated 15 breeding pairs existed in the state. Today, an estimated 100,000 birds are estimated to reside across Wisconsin, Michigan and Ontario, Canada.

The crane’s historical habitat of wetlands and prairies overlaps with the region of central Wisconsin where much of the state’s agricultural operation takes place, putting the birds — who dig up and eat the corn seeds after they’re planted and before they germinate — into conflict with farmers. Cranes, Lacy said, are also territorial and mated pairs return year after year to the same spots to nest. It doesn’t help, she added, that baby colts are hatching around the same time in the spring that farmers are planting their crops.

In 2022, Wisconsin agricultural producers reported an estimated $900,000 in crop damage from the birds (which Lacy said is probably an undercount).

Farmers in Wisconsin already kill about 1,000 of the birds every year through federally available depredation permits. But Lacy said the U.S. Department of Agriculture doesn’t track the success of those permits at preventing damage. She said killing the birds could even backfire for a farmer because killing a pair of mates who have claimed that territory could open it up to a larger flock of individuals who would be even more destructive.

Lacy said that Avipel, which works by recreating a chemical that naturally occurs in plants to make it more bitter and unappealing to the birds, is the only solution that is proven to be effective — though she was understanding of the hesitance from farmers wary of adding another step to their planting process and increased costs. Avipel is considered “practically non-toxic” by federal regulators and does not get absorbed into the plant, so has no effect on the harvested corn.

But for birds, “it takes the food item off the menu,” she said.

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