Operation Migration was a nonprofit organization that used ultralight aircraft to teach migration routes to endangered whooping cranes. Founded in 1994 in Canada and 1999 in the USA, it helped establish a reintroduced eastern population of whooping cranes, which numbered 81 individuals by 2021, supplementing the naturally occurring wild population of 506 birds. The program ended in 2016 after the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service concluded that human intervention had impaired the cranes' ability to develop essential parenting skills.