Edmonton Journal from Edmonton, Alberta, Canada • 48

m) hUUm Science E6 SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 22, 2009 EDMONTON JOURNAL edmontonjournal.com HERDING WHOOPERS Joseph Duff delights in playing Mother Goose to young whooping cranes bred in captmfy. Dressing up like a bird, the pilot guides his endangered flock along ancient migration routes Teaching young cranes old tricks DAMELE PINTO Columbia News Service NEW YORK When Joseph Duff quit his job as a photograph er to join a friend in leading migrating birds with an ultralight plane, many dismissed them with skepticism. Yet, after the two men successfully shepherded Canada geese down south in 1993, Duff knew he could deploy the same methods to save the whooping crane, one of the most endan gered species on Earth. And so it came to pass that for the past eight au tumns Duff, a 59-year-old Canadian, has put on a white bird costume and hooked up an MP3 player to an amplifier that blasts the sound of brooding crane mothers. Then he leads 20 young cranes bred in captivity from the Necedah National Wildlife Refuge in Wisconsin to Florida, teaching them the ancient routes of migration.

These flights, which can last up to 94 days depending on weather conditions, were first greeted with caution by wildlife experts. But now Duffs work enjoys credibility among scientists worldwide. They see his effort as a rare example of man-made salvation amid the destruction of habitats and climate change. "This idea is a stroke of brilliant genius," said Dr. Jeff Groth, an ornithologist with the American Museum of Natural History in New York City.

"How else would you get reintroduced cranes to migrate?" Since the migrations began in 2001, Duff and three other pilots from Operation Migration, his non-profit organization, have reintroduced 91 Whooping cranes, helping to boost to 357 a wild population that in 1945 numbered only 15. This is cheery news, not just for the only endan-; gered crane variety in North America, but also for a continent where 20 common bird species have decreased by up to 82 per cent over the past j40 years, and 19 other species are on the Audubon Society's red list. Each year Joseph Duff gets behind the controls of his ultralight plane and leads a group of young, endangered whooping cranes to the warmth of Florida. The flights have taught ancient migration routes to dozens of birds raised in captivity. Scientists have praised this unorthodox method to boost the wild population of a nearly extinct species.

pilot is their mother. Duff constandy looks back at them and checks his GPS, aware that even the slightest error might ruin a year of hard work. "It's like the bird is fastened to the aircraft by a very thin thread," he you go too fast, the thread breaks." Duff co-founded Operation Migration in Port Per ry, in 1994 with William Lishman, a sculptor and fellow Canadian amateur ultralight pilot. Their early experience with Canada geese inspired the 1996 moviefTyAvqyHome. For four years, the men did trial runs with the more common sand with the plane by feeding them mealworms around the aircraft.

The pilots wear the same outfit during the flight. "We want to raise a bird that is afraid of people," said Male, who is well aware that the animals might grow too comfortable around humans, relying on them for food or mistaking them as potential mating partners. Duff, who now devotes himself to the cause of whooping cranes, confirms that the costume is crucial to fool the birds. His entire team makes sure to limit time with the chicks so that they don't bond too tightly. So far there have been no major hiccups, thanks to years of trials and errors with sandhill cranes.

Duffs team worked out kinks such as birds landing on golf courses and schoolyards. This required the men to review protocols many times before perfecting them in 1998. Duff hopes it continues that way. "This is a 16-million-year-old species; they arrived shortly after the dinosaurs disappeared," he said. "We are honoured to participate in their migration." Daniele Pinto is a master's candidate at Columbia Vniversity Graduate School of journalism.

'This is a 16-miUion-year-old species. are honoured to participate in their migration." oseph Duff, pilot and whooping crane migration leader "You don't want to put all your eggs in one basket," said Jonathan Male, an aviculturist at the Patuxent Wildlife Research Center in Laurel, which breeds the juvenile cranes that Duff helps migrate to the Chassahowitzka National Wildlife Refuge in Florida. Male and his team encourage the chicks to bond with the plane and pilot. For that to happen, they expose the chicks to the sound of the plane's engine while they are still in the egg. After they hatch, a technician wearing a crane costume, resembling something between a bur-ka and a biohazard suit, acquaints the newborns hill crane, until U.S.

wildlife authorities allowed them to take chances with the whooping species in 1998. i Although Duff is not a scientist and has no or-; nithological training, his project has caught the eye of Russian conservationists, who want to adapt it to save the even-more-threatened Siberian crane. "I think it's great," said Duff, who visited Siberia and trained interns from Russia. "It's more for the birds if we can get this to apply to other species Humans nearly caused the extinction of the whooping crane by hunting and drying out the marshes and wedands in southern United States where the cranes bred for millions of years. Just as delicate as their habitat is the act of reintroducing birds raised in captivity to natural migration routes.

Hundreds of metres over the Appalachian Mountains, Duff wears a white costume at the controls as he carefully maintains his speed at 48 kmh. The birds follow the aircraft, gliding just past its wingtips, in the mistaken impression that the The birds they have reintroduced exist alongside the only indigenous wild flockofwhooping cranes left in the world, which migrates between the Aransas National Wildlife Refuge near Corpus Chrisa, and Wood Buffalo National Park in northern Alberta. The two flocks are kept separate so that they don't spread diseases they have different immune systems and to avoid a mass wipeout in a cataclysm such as a hurricane. 7 Attention math geeks -here a day to have -i and eat it, too your pi ,7 1 HOLLY FLETCHER Columbia News Service NEW YORK 50 't-jtc I Mathematicians have calculated and recalculated pi for millennia, looking for repetition or an end. Thinkers from Archimedes to Isaac Newton to Leonhard Euler spent coundess hours unravelling the numbers.

Newton is quoted as saying he would be "embarrassed" if people knew how much time he had devoted to calculating pi. Albert Einstein, J. arguably historys most famous Larry Shaw, the father of Pi Day, leads a pi parade at the Exploratorium science museum in San Francisco on March 14, 2008. mathematician, was born on March 14. The advent of com- puters has only fuelled the mys- tique.Asof2002, Exploratorium, an interactive science museum in San Francisco, started a celebration for the museum staff.

Now the museum hosts an an pi had been calculated to more than 1.2 trillion decimal places. Nevertheless, many people do not tire of trying to remem nual extravaganza in which visi- tors can eat pie (pizza or dessert) watch a Pi Day parade and add to a lone At precisely 1:59 p.m. on March 14, thousands of people all over the world will pause before their computer screens to watch the Giant Pi a talking pi symbol with facial features drop, much like the crystal ball that falls at midnight in Times Square on New Year's Eve. What's the fuss? It's Pi Day, of course. For centuries, mathematicians and elementary school students have contemplated the famous ratio that is the circumference of a circle divided by its diameter.

The result turns out to be, so far at least, an infinite number known by the Greek letter pi. The first six digits of pi are 3.14159, so naturally the Giant Pi drops on March 14 (314) at 1:59 p.m. Since its humble beginning two decades ago, Pi Day has developed into a major holiday, supercharged by the growth of the Internet, which unites aficionados of the never-ending number worldwide. Tens of thousands of people are expected to tune in this year to the annual drop of the Giant Pi at MathematiciansPictures.com, sas Allan Green, a spokesman for the website. Parties are held at schools, labs and offices.

Actual pie the round kind with a flaky crust is the obvious fare of choice. "It's the Christmas of cyberspace," Green says. "There are math nerds and geeks in all walks of life, not just in schools. There are some math wonks on Wall Street, too." For hard-core mathematicians, pi, hich is central to many equations, represents a numerical marvel that is similar to the famous conundrum, Which came first, the chicken or the egg? To the math world, the question is, Which came first, the circle or the ratio? ber hundreds of its endless string of colour-coded beads in which each digits. Akira Haraguchi, a retired engineer from Japan and the reputed world-record holder, memorized 100,000 A Pi plate The two hoped to marry this March 14 but have decided to wait a year.

One thing is for certain: They will serve pie, not cake, at the wedding. "When we were talking about getting married, he said, 'We should have the symbol pi on top of the Stramel recalls, adding that she has got into math and pi "a little more" since dating Lamoureux. As an 11-year-old, Alex Pagels, now a freshman astrophysics major at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, memorized pi to 200 digits. These days he can only remember 150 decimal places, but his Facebook profile picture is of a lime-green pi symbol. Last year, Pagels and a friend pooled their money to carrypie to school on March 14.

This year, he hopes he can grab a slice of his favourite, rhubarb-peach, Greeaof MathematiciansPicrures.com, home of the talking pi, says that officially the Giant Pi prefers strawberry pie. But he quickly adds that the filling doesn't really matter as long as the circumference of the pie can be measured with the equation CZ-rr. Ilolh Hetcher is a master candidate at Columbia I niversih Graduate School of journalism. digits of pi in 2006. It took him about 16 hours to recite them.

"Pi, in and of itself, describes the way the world looks to us, like the curviness of a circle," says Tanoy Sinha, an associate at a financial-consulting firm in New York, who was also bom on March 14. "We're never going to know exactly what it is," he adds. bead corresponds to a number representing a single decimal place. From these humble terrestrial beginnings, Pi Day has evolved into a major cyberspace event. Websites now hawk T-shirts, buttons, Pi Day cards and coffee mugs.

There are pi raps posted on YouTube. One avid pi-ster from the Netherlands sells pi-shaped baking pans, so people can literally take a bite out of it. Some celebrants are so ardent that they choose to marry on the day. Melissa StrameL 34, and her fiance, Andre Lamoureux, a 25-year-old PhD candidate in mathematics education at Washington State University in Pullman, met when Stramel, a history major, went for tutoring after scoring a dismal 23 on her first math test. Love blossomed.

The festivities for pi apparently began in the late 1980s when Larry Shaw, a physicist at the.