Photographer Michael Forsberg has long been known for creating photography for a cause. His first book, On Ancient Wings: The Sandhill Cranes of North America, came out 20 years ago and shared the life history of the beloved species through his elegant photographs and words. Now, the Lincoln native and award-winning conservation photographer is back at it with a chronicle of the world’s most endangered crane species.

Into Whooperland: A Photographer’s Journey with Whooping Cranes, is the product of a five-year passion project to raise awareness about the birds. Overflowing with beautiful images, this is not one of those large photography books that dwarfs a coffee table. But it is large enough to allow the reader to fully appreciate the beauty of these animals and their habitat, and still easily toss it into a backpack for a bird-watching trip or other excursion. 

Forsberg tells the conservation stories of these birds, such as how fewer than 20 whoopers remained in the 1940s.

He writes about their habitat requirements, the many threats to the mix of wetlands and uplands they depend on, and introduces readers to individual birds (like the one nicknamed Husker Red) and a dedicated group of biologists, conservationists, land managers and landowners working to ensure whooping cranes persist within their historic but changing landscapes.

Forsberg, a faculty member at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and a fellow with the Center for Great Plains Studies, credits family trips to the Rocky Mountains with his parents for inspiring his love of the outdoors. Experiencing the sandhill crane migration for the first time with his grandparents in Kearney during high school sparked a deep connection with the birds that merged with his soul. The most common crane species on Earth, sandhill cranes – along with whooping cranes, the rarest of the world’s 15 crane species – both rely on Nebraska’s Platte River during their spring and fall migrations. 

The author/photographer who does not claim to be a writer traveled far from his Nebraska roots for the book project. With a friend at the controls of a 1957 Cessna 172, and with the spring whooping crane migration underway, Forsberg took off. He headed north from near the cranes’ wintering grounds at Aransas National Wildlife Refuge in Texas. This was not a flight with whooping cranes flapping alongside the airplane. But it did allow Forsberg to see what the birds see from the air, and to touch down each night to fuel up, feed and rest, just like the cranes. Eighteen days later, after an aerial journey of roughly 3,000 miles, the plane touched down near the birds’ nesting grounds deep within the 11-million-acre wilderness of Wood Buffalo National Park in Canada.

Eight days hiding in a camouflaged blind in that Canadian wilderness while subsisting on mostly meat sticks, nuts and granola bars provided a rare window into these endangered birds’ lives and yielded some of the most intimate whooping crane images ever captured by any photographer. Merciless hordes of blood thirsty insects found their way through mosquito netting and into the blind. Still, Forsberg stuck it out. He calls it “Being comfortable with being uncomfortable.” 

He was photographing – click, click, click – at the very moment that a baby whooping crane, still wet and fresh out of the egg, stood up for the first time; when it swallowed a larval dragonfly as its first meal, and as the young crane – called a colt – took its first swim.

The photo opportunities were not always as uplifting. Aerial images showing coastal development in the cranes’ southern wintering areas, industrial agriculture in the Great Plains where migrating cranes depend on continually shrinking areas of grassland and wetlands, and tar sands open-pit mining near Canadian nesting grounds illustrate only a few of the many threats to whooping crane recovery.

Forsberg shot more than 100,000 photographs while working on the book. Time lapse cameras positioned within the migratory flyway in Nebraska and elsewhere – and one mounted to the airplane itself – captured another 330,000 more. About 120 photos made the book. Many more are being used at the new interactive website, whoopingcranechronicles.com. Several of the time lapse cameras used during the project did not survive.

One was pecked to pieces by a nesting whooping crane in Louisiana. A second camera was likely struck by lightning in Texas. Forsberg especially laments the images lost when a camera mounted to a tree in whooping crane nesting habitat was burned and melted in 2023, a record year for wildfires in Canada.

“Photos of wildfire sweeping across that landscape would have been important,” said Forsberg, who while working on the book, logged roughly 50,000 miles through the ancient migration corridor that he calls the Whooper Highway.

“Whooping cranes are beautiful. They are rare,” Forsberg said. “They are more resilient than we think, and their future is still in our hands.”