The Bird Man of Idaho

By Terry McCarthy

Kent Clegg likes watching birds, and he likes flying ultralight planes. He finds ways to do both, to the birds' profit. In 1997 Clegg got whooping cranes to follow him in his ultralight from Idaho to New Mexico to try to restart a breeding population of the rare birds in the southwest. Now he has a new passion: trumpeter swans.

The largest waterfowl in the U.S., with wingspans up to 8 ft., trumpeters were hunted nearly to extinction. Their numbers slowly recovered--Idaho now has some 250 resident trumpeters and gets an additional 3,000 in winter migrating from Canada. But too many of the migrants land in the same place, the Henry's Fork River, where they exhaust the food supply and are at risk of disease. So Idaho's Fish and Game wanted to relocate some birds, dispersing the population.

Problem: how to catch the powerful, skittish birds. Enter Clegg, 45, who runs a small farm in Grace, Idaho. He rigged an airboat with an ultralight engine that could navigate over the top of icy rivers. And he went out in awful conditions. "The best time is during the worst type of weather when the snow is flying--that keeps the swans on the ground," he says. He found he could temporarily stun the trumpeters by shining a spotlight on them, which allows him to bundle them up. They are released on the Bear River, 200 miles to the south, where they have more room to feed and flourish. Since 2001 Clegg has collected about 100 swans each winter for relocation. Now Idaho Fish and Game wants to see if the birds have learned to migrate from Canada to their new home. With the first snows, Clegg will be up in his ultralight, making the commute. --By Terry McCarthy