POCATELLO, Idaho — To about a dozen rare whooping cranes, Kent Clegg was a role model and the leader of the flock.
In an ultralight plane, Clegg, of Grace, led the large, white cranes, which he hatched in incubators, on an 800-mile trip from Grace to New Mexico's Bosque del Apache Wildlife Refuge.
His project, funded by a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service grant, aimed to succeed where others had failed in restoring a whooping crane migration out West, in the Pacific Flyway.
He got the eggs from a Maryland wildlife research center.
Although Clegg's whooping crane project was quashed after a single 1997 journey — he says it was put off for political reasons — he believes his efforts were not in vain.
Researchers attempting to restore a migration route from central Wisconsin to southern Florida are using his trail-blazing discoveries for their ongoing project.
The final crane from Clegg's flock, which spent summers north of Soda Springs, disappeared in the fall of 2001.
He said the sad part is that the experiment was working.
"The state of Idaho wouldn't support having another endangered species in their state," Clegg said. "I'm confident we would have had the birds well on their way to re-establishing a flock of whooping cranes."
Clegg said his research shows the Pacific Flyway is viable for whooping cranes, but the Western political climate must change.
In 1995 and 1996, Clegg performed test flights with sandhill cranes to see if he could get the birds to follow his aircraft.
His experiment succeeded — the sandhills followed his aircraft on the migration route — and he tried a migration with whooping cranes. The whooping cranes scattered after his funding was pulled.
Eleven years before Clegg attempted to bring the whooping crane back to the West, the Southeast Idaho National Wildlife Refuge Complex ended its own project at Grays Lake National Wildlife Refuge.
Between 1975 and 1988, researchers placed whooping crane eggs from a native population in Canada in sandhill crane nests, hoping the sandhills would raise the whooping cranes and that whooping cranes would breed with one another.
Whooping cranes typically lay two eggs, but most of the time, only one baby crane survives.
Dick Munoz, project leader at Grays Lake, said the wild population, which migrates to Texas for winters, has between 200 and 300 birds.
Experts say the current attempt to restore a whooping crane migration route from the Necedah National Wildlife Refuge in Wisconsin to a refuge in Florida stands a good chance of succeeding.