it will be my extreme pleasure to report to the president. who has been gravely concerned about the fate of our whooping cranes. and to the interior secretary and to the american people that the entire flock of cranes is, indeed, at. hatched chicks there. counting the young birds, there are now approximately sixty cranes in the flock. while this is good news, it is also quite bewildering. whooping cranes are territorially minded and have never been known to nest as close as a mile to one another, yet here they are virtually side by side.