There was a resident colony of these birds in Louisiana until the late 1940s, but gumbo pots and hurricanes took their toll. Now, the only whooping cranes in Louisiana are these two, Kiowa and Sioux, at the Audubon Park zoo, and several at the research center in Chalmette.
Dr. Sammy King of the Louisiana Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Unit – USGS is planning research projects on crane issues in Louisiana, including determining the summer range of sandhill cranes that winter in Louisiana. Additional habitat assessment studies would be done at White Lake for a possible nonmigratory whooping crane population and at Marsh Island as a wintering site for a possible migratory flock.
Three migrating whoopers were shot at on 6 November 2004 in Kansas while on their 2,500-mile annual migration from Wood Buffalo National Park in Alberta, Canada to south Texas, and at least two of them were hit by shotgun pellets. One had to have a leg amputated and later died, one was badly injured and was transported to the USGS-Patuxent Wildlife Research Center in Laurel, MD, and died on 9 Dec. The third crane continued its migration on 10 Dec.
An arial survey of the Aransas National Wildlife Refuge in south Texas on 1 December 2004 showed 216 whoopers made the migration from Wood Buffalo National Park in Alberta, Canada this year. That's a record number after the whooping crane population dropped to a low of 16 in the late 1940s.

Update: There are now whooping cranes at White Lake in Vermilion Parish.