Original-Cin Q&A: Director’s Doc on Rescued Cranes Offers Rare Good-News Nature Story
By Kim Hughes
In precarious times when it seems like each day brings another bad news story about the degradation of the planet and resultant threats to vulnerable wildlife, it’s thrilling to hear a true-life tale of successful conservation and restoration.
Sarika Cullis-Suzuki and George Archibald with a crane puppet costume.
That’s the happy takeaway from Nova Scotia-based director Megan Wennberg’s superb documentary Dances with Cranes, premiering March 13 (9 pm, 9:30 NT) on CBC’s The Nature of Things and on CBC Gem and hosted by Sarika Cullis-Suzuki, daughter of Nature of Things lynchpin David Sukuzi who, as the film reveals, has a personal connection to the story.
“In the last 50 years cranes have become the most endangered family of birds on the planet, with several species on the brink of extinction,” the film’s press notes explain. “Dances with Cranes follows septuagenarian George Archibald (co-founder of the International Crane Foundation), and his international team, as they strive to come up with creative solutions to how humans and cranes can continue to co-exist before it’s too late.”
Creative isn’t the half of it. In one of the film’s most fascinating segments, we watch as conservationists dress in white sacks while wielding hand puppets that look like whooping cranes to teach juveniles how to hunt without inculcating dependence on humans — “imprinting” is the official term — so the birds can eventually be successfully released back into the wild. Call it the ultimate in costuming.
Wennberg’s cameras also caught devastating 2023 wildfires in Northwest Territories (and the aftermath in 2024) which imperiled the cranes’ essential nesting areas. As well, the film travels from the wetlands of Wood Buffalo National Park to the salt marshes of Texas “to capture the beauty and elegance of this rare but resilient bird.”
Considering there were only 20-odd whooping cranes remaining in the 1940s, the work to save them as chronicled in Dances with Cranes — so named because the birds do, in fact, “dance” as part of courtship, bonding, and dominance displays — is enormously inspiring. It’s estimated there are about 800 cranes in North America today.
Director Wennberg — see also 2023’s Unsyncable — spoke with Original-Cin from just outside Halifax in the lead-up to her film’s debut.
ORIGINAL-CIN: How did this story get on your radar?
Director Megan Wennberg
MEGAN WENNBERG: During the pandemic, I was reading Elizabeth Kolbert’s book The Sixth Extinction which is brilliant but also very depressing. I started to wonder if there were any species where humans had turned things around from the brink of extinction. I researched that and whopping cranes were one of the first cases that showed up where humans had intervened for good. Quite quickly, I came across a story about this man named George Archibald who was dancing with an imprinted crane named Tex. I was fascinated. I knew I wanted to try and track George down. Funny enough, when I reached out to the Crane Foundation in Wisconsin, I discovered that George was originally from Nova Scotia. He first heard about the plight of cranes when he was just a little boy in a one-room schoolhouse in rural Nova Scotia.
O-C: The costumes the crane minders wear to prevent imprinting is so intriguing… and so surprisingly effective. As a visual storyteller, that must have really struck you.
MW: Visually, it’s so compelling and strange, these people in these crazy white robes with the hoods and crane puppets on their hands guiding the chicks to ‘Eat this but not this.’ It’s a pretty ingenious way of avoiding imprinting, making sure these chicks imprint not on humans but on these white shapes. That was a lesson they learned the hard way from George dancing with Tex. (George danced with Tex because she was already imprinted due to how she was raised in Texas; the dancing was the only way they could think of at the time to get an imprinted crane to reproduce).
Similarly, when [the conservationists] were teaching the eastern migratory flock to migrate from Wisconsin to Florida — which was this new route they created — they would use pilots dressed as cranes in the full white get-up. They’d even play the sound of the ultralight airplane [that would guide the flocks] revving up while the eggs were incubating to get them used to the sound and not spook them.
O-C: Your film spotlights many very smart, selfless people, from veterinarians and biologists to Indigenous elders to those who tag and monitor the birds, who are incredibly dedicated. What’s the quality that unites and motivates them?
MW: Genuine care. They genuinely care about the well-being of the birds but also, more broadly, they care about the well-being of the world. Because saving whooping cranes saves wetlands and myriad other species that depend on them. Everyone we met cares about the future of the world and wants to leave it a better place.
O-C: What was the hardest thing to get right with this film?
MW: We wanted to do justice to an incredible recovery story that has involved so many people over so many decades. And there’s so much we couldn’t include but wanted to. For instance, the Calgary Zoo also works toward whooping crane recovery. I really hope this film reaches people because I feel like it’s a hopeful story at a time when we definitely need them. The people we feature show that it is possible to work towards a positive outcome if you’re willing to make the effort and put in the time.