A very special flock of birds with unusual parents touched down in Winnebago county on their way south for warmer weather. 23 news reporter Chris Norman reports.

Learning to head south for the winter is natural for a lot of birds, but this flock of endangered whooping cranes needs a little guidance to get it right. Operation Migration is a group dedicated to helping the birds survive on their own. In the 1940s whooping cranes were on the verge of extinction, and today there are only about 500 of them left. To help reintroduce these birds to the wild, pilots like Joe Duff train them to follow ultralight aircraft, and then teach them a migration route.

"We act as parents and become surrogates, and we use the aircraft to teach them the route, and we do this every year with a new generation. And on the return trip they do it on their own and we're slowly building up the population," Duff said.

The birds are raised with almost no direct human contact. Handlers and pilots must wear special outfits, so when the cranes are released they stay away from people and machines for their own safety.

"They've never seen a car up close, or a pop can or a bycicle, or heard a human voice, they're always kept in isolation, and that's the idea, so that when they're released and encounter those things for the first time they'll be afraid of them."

Pilot Brooke Pennypacker calls the cranes the ballerinas of the sky. And like a ballet, it takes a lot of manpower and organization to complete their airborne dance.

"We have four ultralights in the air at all times, we also have a topcover plane that flys above us to clear airspace problems out of our way, and then we also have a ground vehicle that tracks us, in case we have a bird go down and has to be picked up and we have a ground vehicle that tracks us and takes care of that," Pennypacker says.

Over the next month they will fly about 1250 miles, from central Wisconsin to southern Florida.

"When we reach the end in florida it's time to stop fooling around with them and let them be wild birds, and that's a good feeling, it's kind of neat," Duff says.

With a little help, they hope the endangered whooping crane will eventually land on its feet. In Winnebago county, Chris Norman, 23 News Right Now.

Operation migration hopes to train 125 cranes to fly on their own to create a self-sustaining population. To find out how you can help operation migration, or just track their progress you head to operationmigration.org.