[dropcap]T[/dropcap]here’s good news about whooping cranes.  This year, some 431 birds have shown up at Aransas National Wildlife Refuge down on the Texas coast.  This includes 50 juvenile birds and is quite an improvement over the number registered back in 1941.

In that year, the entire number of whooping cranes in the world totaled 15 birds.

In fact, if President Franklin Roosevelt had not created the Aransas refuge back in 1937, it’s a good bet the whooping crane would be extinct ...