Sammy King is an expert on wetlands and the many species of waterbirds and other wildlife that call these habitats home. He leads the U.S. Geological Survey’s Louisiana Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit and is an adjunct professor teaching courses in the LSU School of Renewable Resources. He has helped with efforts to reintroduce the whooping crane in Louisiana, and today, there are dozens of the birds living in the state.

How did you first become interested in wetlands?

I grew up in Watson in Livingston Parish in Louisiana and fished a lot with my dad throughout south Louisiana, and a friend of mine had property on the Amite River. We would run up and down the river in a little jon boat and set up trotlines. I learned a lot about the river, but I just loved being outdoors. And so I went off to college and first started out in prephysical therapy and went to do my volunteer hours. And after about 15 minutes, I was like, “This is not what I'm going to be doing.”

I had a cousin who was working for the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries, and he talked to me about getting a master's in wildlife. And so I went to Auburn University and worked with prescribed fire and cottontail rabbits — and I also knew that that was not the direction I was going to go either. But my last year there, I took a 20-day field trip with Dr. George Folkerts, who was the greatest teacher that I've ever been around, the greatest naturalist. We slept on the ground in September in Florida. We didn't have tents or anything like that. We were up at 5 in the morning, and we'd go to 1 or 2 in the morning wading around the wetlands, catching all kinds of critters and learning about them. And I was hooked at that point.

Whooping cranes vanished from Louisiana in the mid-20th century. What led to their demise, and why was it important to bring them back?

Historically, we had more whooping cranes than anywhere in North America. We had both the migratory population that bred in the Midwest and would come down to the coastal prairie region of southwest Louisiana, which now has been converted mostly to rice. And then we had a resident population that was centered at White Lake Wetlands Conservation Area. Primarily because of draining of wetlands for agriculture in Illinois and Iowa, we lost that population of whooping cranes around 1918.

We continued to have the resident flock up until 1950. Eventually the numbers got so low, they were down to one bird. A guy by the name of John Lynch, a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologist, went up in a helicopter and pinned the bird down. He literally put the whooping crane in a station wagon and drove it over to Aransas National Wildlife Refuge, which is where the wild migratory flock would come to, and released it. Unfortunately, it died a short time later, and with the death of a Louisiana bird in captivity, we lost the genetic stock for the Louisiana population.

As part of the recovery of the species, the idea was we didn't want just one migratory population to be everything for whooping cranes. With endangered species, you want to have multiple populations to increase the resiliency of the species. If something were to happen with that migratory flock, would we have other birds that would be established in the landscape that could save the species? Also, Louisiana has the most intact habitat anywhere in the country in terms of whooping cranes. And so, in 2011, Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries began to release birds in southwest Louisiana to try to rebuild that nonmigratory population here in the state.

How do environmental factors affect cranes and other species?

What I tend to think of is that the birds — or a product or a pattern — that emerge in nature is just like if you're baking a cake. The cake is the product, but there's all these processes that go into making that cake.

We study a lot of hydrology, looking at flooding patterns. We look at soils. We try to understand what dictates when plants germinate and what plants germinate under various conditions because those are the things that are going to be driving foraging habitat and nesting habitat for these birds. We go into a wetland and assess what the problems are. Why are we not getting the vegetation that we thought we would, or why is there such low productivity in this system? We focus on the processes that are leading to the production of the birds because it's so important to be able to produce them.

You have spent a lot of time working in the field and taking your students on expeditions. How do hands-on experiences in other locations improve one’s understanding of wetlands?

If you grow up in Louisiana, you see so many wetlands, and the climate is one climate. And as you move west and you get less rainfall, you get more drought. You just move into different kinds of climatic patterns. The wetlands look very different, and so it forces them to think about what are those driving processes that make wetlands function. It gets students super excited. There's no way that you can't get excited when you're standing on a mountaintop looking at Great Salt Lake or some of the other places that we go.

Olivia McClure is a photographer, writer and editor for AgCenter Communications.

This article appeared in the spring 2024 edition of Louisiana Agriculture.

Sammy King, an expert on wetlands and an adjunct professor in the LSU School of Renewable Natural Resources, poses at Crater Lake in Oregon. Provided photo

Sammy King has helped reintroduce the whooping crane to Louisiana. There are now dozens of the birds living in the state. Photo provided by Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries