It is very sad but if a species cannot adapt and reproduce and thrive on its own it is destined to die. That is the law of survival and Mother Nature Rules. The scientific community has been mollycoddling this species since I was a child(and I am 65) and there are still less than 300 of them. There is a refuge on the coast here in Texas and they are beautiful birds.
Kept in an enclosure, nobody read their behavior correctly and they perished: released, perhaps most would have survived. Sad.
True, and before you were a child, we were eating them.
I think they were down to 11 in the wild in the 40s. When they found where they were nesting (somewhere around Great Slave Lake, they discovered that if they stole one of their eggs, the cranes would lay another and raise their family and the scientists raised one.
In the 80s or so, they let some sandhill cranes in Oregon raise some whooping cranes. It was hoped that this would start a new flock. The whooping cranes, however, could never determine their identity and never mated. I saw a couple of them with a whole lot of sandhill cranes at the Bosque del Apache NWR in New Mexico. You could drive right up to them in your car, but if the cranes saw someone on foot, it was difficult to get within 1/4 mile of them.
As pointed out, they were once down to only the teens in number in the 1940s: they probably never were very numerous. But, like the ivory-billed woodpecker, I'd hate to have them go extinct in my lifetime. Heck, I only missed seeing mastodons by just 13,000 years!