04/28/2004
Baseball and Birds
Before leaving for Hong Kong, editor Brian Trumbore left me with a new book, “Baseball Forever” by Ralph Kiner with Danny Peary and suggested I get a column out of it. Kiner’s book brought back a lot of memories. Kiner and I both arrived in Pittsburgh in 1946. I was there to start my job as a graduate assistant and pursue my graduate studies in the chemistry department at the University of Pittsburgh while Kiner was embarking on his major league baseball career with the Pirates. We both ended up in Halls of Fame, Kiner in the one at Cooperstown and I in the Mechanicsburg Area High School Alumni Association Hall of Fame. Admittedly, Kiner’s Hall is a bit better known than mine! Today, we’re both in communications, he as a broadcaster of the New York Mets baseball games, while I’m communicating with you readers via my Bortrum columns.
In Pittsburgh we worked and lived only a few blocks from each other and, over a period of four years there, I spent more than a hundred afternoons or evenings at Forbes Field watching Kiner and his colleagues ply their trade. A few of his colleagues were baseball legends. If you’re a baseball card collector, you know that a bona fide original Honus Wagner card is the most valuable card you can own. The real Honus Wagner was a coach for the Pirates while I was there. I just learned from the book that he just put on a uniform and was an “honorary” coach. Hank Greenberg played his last year with the Pirates, serving as Kiner’s mentor and becoming Kiner’s good friend and best man at his wedding.
Kiner and I also shared an initial dismay and shock at the state of the environment in Pittsburgh in 1946. He arrived from sunny California at 10 AM one morning to find it pitch black, an all too common situation in the city of steel mills and the burning of soft coal. In class my notebook pages would be smudged after less than an hour of note taking and the powder blue suit my mother bought me for my stay in Pittsburgh was worn only once! But Kiner and I stayed in Pittsburgh long enough to see that the environment can be turned around drastically if proper measures are taken. The burning of soft coal was stopped and we students no longer would argue, at noon, whether it was the sun or a street lamp out there shining feebly in the darkness!
Speaking of bringing back memories and changing the environment, let’s talk about bringing back a bird that was at the brink of extinction when Ralph and I came to Pittsburgh. The April issue of National Geographic has an article, “Cranes”, by Jennifer Ackerman that includes an account of an effort to reintroduce the whooping crane to the eastern United States. I believed I’ve touched on this subject in the past and it’s good to be able to report significant progress in this endeavor. What follows is based on the Geographic article and on visits to the Web sites of Operation Migration, the Chassahowitzka National Wildlife Refuge and Whooping Crane Eastern Partnership.
The whooping crane is the tallest bird in North America and the big males can be 5 feet tall with wingspans of seven feet. Their whoops can be heard more than a mile away. Back in the 1860s, roughly 1,400 whoopers are thought to have been flying through the skies. Hunting and habitat loss took their toll over the years and by the early 1940s there was only one migratory flock of 15 birds and a handful of others for a total of 21 birds! The migratory flock’s migrations took them from Aransas Wildlife Refuge in Texas to the Wood Buffalo National Park, Northwest Territory Canada and back. It’s a tribute to the whooper itself and to the efforts involving hunting restrictions and habitat preservation that this Aransas/Wood Buffalo flock has managed a comeback until the population in 2003 was 184 whoopers. This is the only wild population that is self-sustaining.
While this comeback of the migrating whoopers is encouraging, the possibility of this flock encountering a killer disease or some weather-related disaster prompted an effort to establish other flocks in separate regions of North America. Captive breeding was used to establish a non-migratory flock located in the Kissimmee lake region in Florida. The first breeding pair to produce and raise a whooper in the eastern U. S. accomplished this task in 2002. As of the spring of last year, there were 94 whoopers in this flock.
But the work that has garnered the most attention by the public is the effort to establish a migratory flock migrating between the Chassahowitzka National Wildlife Refuge on the west coast of Florida and the Necedah National Wildlife Refuge in Wisconsin. The Florida site was selected as being sufficiently far from Texas that no mixing of the two migratory flocks should occur. I’m not sure of the latest figure but I gather that there are over 30 whoopers in this Florida/Wisconsin flock. Today, there are some 300 wild whoopers and another hundred or in captivity, according to the Geographic article.
The establishment of this Florida/Wisconsin flock involves a strategy of trickery that you may have seen on nature TV shows. Whooping crane chicks are raised without hearing a human voice or seeing humans, unless the humans are dressed up in whooping crane costumes. When the chicks learn to fly they are trained to follow a human “crane” piloting an ultralight aircraft. When migration time comes the “crane” piloting the ultralight leads them on the path from Wisconsin to Florida with stops on the way. With the flight path imprinted on the youngsters’ brains, the hope was that the birds would then migrate back to Wisconsin on their own in the spring. The birds that survived the initial flight to Florida and the winter in Florida did indeed wend their way back to Wisconsin. The program begun in the early 1990s has been a success, thanks to the dedication of the workers who have labored long and hard to trick those chicks into following their faux crane parents.
Credit must also be given to the workers in Florida at the Chassahowitzka Refuge. They’ve brought in 300 helicopter loads of shells to help build up an existing oyster shell reef to form a night nesting roost for the whoopers. An electrified fence keeps out predators such as bobcats. Just the other night I saw part of a nature show on TV that was describing the program to save the Florida panther from extinction. I hope they keep the two environmental subjects sufficiently apart. Managing the environment is not an easy task, as we’ve seen so often in past columns.
Private landowners, over 35 of them, have also volunteered their properties as stopover sites for the cranes and their migration team along the migration path. Temporary pens protect the cranes from predators and the humans in the team don their crane costumes and employ adult crane puppet heads to maintain the subterfuge from the time the chicks are hatched until they’ve become part of the migratory flock. If you’re wondering about the confinement of the birds in the Chassahowitzka site, the cranes are free to fly out of the site to forage. However, through supplemental feeding, they are lured back to the protected pen area to roost at night.
We certainly wish these dedicated workers and volunteers all the best in their effort to bring back the whooper. Getting back to Kiner’s book, there’s one species I’m sure modern day baseball players would not like to bring back – the old fashioned team trainer. Unlike today’s skilled trainers who use up to date medical findings and the best equipment to keep players in good shape and extend their careers, the trainers of yore were of a different breed. When Kiner played for the Chicago Cubs after his Pittsburgh years, one of the trainers was an ex-ballplayer who chewed tobacco. When giving a player a rubdown he was wont to spit out some tobacco juice and use it as a lubricant!
The Pirates had a trainer, Doc Jorgensen, who had a bum leg. One day a Pirate player was injured at second base. Jorgensen grabbed his first aid kit, hobbled out to fix the guy up and opened his kit. It was full of ham sandwiches! No wonder the Pirates were in last place. Yet we loved them and supported them well. If I recall correctly, the Pirates drew 2 million in attendance one year. Of course, Kiner, with 51 homers one year was a major factor in attracting us to the ballpark.
As you might have noticed, I’ve been doing my best to show how much I have in common with Ralph Kiner. I admit it’s a stretch. However, I was shocked to find that I actually surpassed him in one baseball statistic. In his rookie year with the Pirates in 1946, his batting average was .247. In my rookie (and only) year playing with the Dickinson College Red Devils, my average was .250! (OK, I had one clean single in 4 official at-bats in our two games with Gettysburg College, the only games we played in that war year.) Being in a generous mood, I’m willing to ignore the slight difference in the averages and call it a tie.
Allen F. Bortrum
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