It takes a long lens to
get a shot of them standing around in a big grassy field.
An adult pair with a
youngster. The little ones are hatched in the Northwest Territories in
Canada, where the cranes summer, and have to grow up fast to fly with their
parents for the migration to their wintering grounds here on the Gulf Coast.
Occasionally the adults
get up and swoop around.
Striking birds, about as
tall as Judy, but with a much greater wingspan.
Their population reached a
low of 15 to 20 birds in the 1940s. This year there are over 500 birds in
the wild, with more in captive breeding programs. It has been an
intensive conservation effort for 80 years to achieve this success. They
are still in real danger, because they only live naturally in two places in the
wild. They migrate between Wood Buffalo National Park in northern Canada,
their breeding grounds in the summer, and Aransas National Wildlife Refuge in
South Texas to winter. Their summer grounds are so remote it was many
years before anyone could figure out where they went. They would show up
here on the coast every winter, then disappear all summer. There are a
couple eastern populations that have been established as a buffer in case a
natural disaster wipes out the primary migrating flock. Still a tenuous
existence.
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