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A major bi-national conservation effort linking the endangered whooping crane’s Canadian breeding grounds to a new experimental colony in Louisiana has suffered a “profound setback” after what officials are calling the “thoughtless” killing of two of the 10 reintroduced birds — allegedly by a pair of teenagers firing gunshots from their truck along a Gulf Coast backroad.

The earlier deaths of four other transplanted cranes over the past nine months have left just four survivors in the new colony at Louisiana’s White Lake wetlands, imperilling a wildlife recovery project that has involved dozens of Canadian and American experts and has attracted high-profile support from U.S. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar.

Fewer than 400 whooping cranes live in the wild, migrating annually between breeding grounds in Wood Buffalo National Park on the Alberta-Northwest Territories border and their wintering site at the Aransas National Wildlife Refuge in Texas.

Another 200 or so whoopers live in managed flocks, and the 10 birds released to the Louisiana reserve in February — including four hatched from eggs raised at a Calgary Zoo breeding facility — represented a significant portion of the species’ entire population in a strategically important new habitat for one of the world’s most threatened animals.

"Losing two cranes, especially in such a thoughtless manner, is a huge setback in the department’s efforts to re-establish a whooping crane population in Louisiana,” Robert Barham, secretary of the state’s wildlife and fisheries department, said in a statement about last month’s crane deaths. “We take this careless crime very seriously.”

Cindy Dohner, a conservation officer with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, added: “This is a profound setback to the many people and organizations who have worked so hard to bring this magnificent bird back to Louisiana.”

Eyewitness reports led investigators to the suspected shooters, who are facing a variety of possible charges under U.S. federal and state laws.

News of the deaths has struck hard at the Calgary Zoo, where conservation research director Axel Moehrenschlager called the loss of the birds “very, very sad.

“It is disappointing when an endangered species is directly killed by people,” he added. “It could be a one-case occurrence or it could be a symptom of things that could continue in the future and I think investigations need to look at it very seriously in that light.”

But Moehrenschlager noted that bringing a vulnerable species back to a former habitat is, by definition, an enormous conservation challenge.

“Reintroduction programs are difficult because a species has disappeared from an area for good reasons — oftentimes very overarching and powerful reasons that have driven the species to extinction in that site,” he said. “Most reintroduction programs, because of these challenges, in fact, fail, (so) it’s really crucial not to be deterred by something like this in the first year. People need to have the courage to carry on and stay with the original plan.”

Prior to February’s reintroduction, the last time a wild whooping crane was seen in Louisiana was in 1950. The conversion of marsh habitat to farmland, destructive hunting practices and other factors led to the bird’s disappearance from the region.

But the Louisiana reintroduction has had strong backing from Salazar, U.S. President Barack Obama’s top conservation official, who described the whooping crane as “an iconic species” whose return to the state represented a “milestone moment” for international wildlife preservation.

The whooping crane’s population was down to just 22 in 1941, prompting a joint U.S.-Canada recovery effort that has become a global model for endangered-species conservation.

Along with the world’s last remaining, naturally migrating whooping crane population from Wood Buffalo park, a UNESCO World Heritage site, there’s a non-migratory flock in Florida and a Wisconsin-based migratory flock that has been trained to follow an ultralight aircraft to Florida each winter as part of another unique, Canadian-led recovery project.

But the proposed Louisiana flock is considered crucial to eventually removing the species from North America’s endangered list because increasing the number of separate, self-sustaining populations — and diversifying the range of whooping crane habitats — is seen as the bird’s best defence against a catastrophic collapse from disease, an extreme weather event or other disasters.

The Calgary Zoo’s whooping crane breeding centre in De Winton, Alta., just south of Calgary, maintains a Wood Buffalo-derived captive flock of about 20 birds. Through natural breeding and artificial insemination, a few dozen fertilized whooping crane eggs are produced annually — sometimes with the assistance of more plentiful sandhill cranes that are enlisted to sit on and help incubate the unhatched whooping crane chicks.

Just a day or two before the baby birds poke their beaks through the shells, the eggs are carefully packed and flown to a partner facility in Maryland, not far from Washington, D.C.

At that site, the U.S. Geological Survey’s Patuxent Wildlife Research Center, the newborn cranes are raised to adulthood before being sent to the Wisconsin flock, to one of the colonies in Florida, or — as of this year — Louisiana.

Next month, another 16 whooping cranes are scheduled to be released to the state’s White Lake reserve to bolster the much-reduced pioneer population of four birds.

Ahead of the Nov. 19 start of duck- and goose-hunting season across Louisiana, state wildlife officials launched an education effort to remind hunters that whooping cranes are strictly off-limits and to urge them to “positively identify your target before you shoot.”