Posted on 02/16/2014 10:44:36 AM PST by patriot08
Texas Treasures 2: The magnificent Whooping Crane
Reaching a height of 5 feet with a wingspread of 7 1/2 feet, it is one of the most majestic, magnificant and rare creatures on earth.
Fantastic video:
Texas Country Reporter: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N2C81bXu29I
Sadly, primarily through hunting and loss of habitat, the population of the magnificent whooping crane has gone from an estimated 10,000+ birds before the settling of Europeans on the continent to 1,300-1,400 birds by 1870- and down to to 15 adults by 1938.
However; thanks to conservation efforts of the Texas Parks and Wildlife, the Aransas National Wildlife Refuse (Tx) and a few others throughout the U.S, there are now an estimated 437 birds in the wild and more than 165 in captivity.
The tallest bird in North America, the whooping crane breeds in the wetlands of Wood Buffalo National Park in northern Canada. Here the cranes perform elaborate running, leaping, wing-flapping dances where mates are chosen for life. Both male and female share nesting duties. One of them is always on the nest. Frequently only one chick survives. Although the chick can leave the nest while still quite young, it is always protected and fed by its parents. Chicks are rust-colored when they hatch. At about four months, chick's feathers begin turning white. By the end of their first migration, they are brown and white, and as they enter their first spring, their plumage is white with black wing tips.
When summer ends, these migratory birds set out for the Gulf Coast of Texas, where they winter in the Aransas National Wildlife Refuge.
Although whooping cranes mate for life, they will accept a new mate if one dies.
These birds are very long-lived. They can live up to 24 years in the wild.
The cranes live in family groups made up of the parents and 1 or 2 offspring.
Their diet consists of blue crabs, clams, frogs, minnows, rodents, and berries.
http://www.tpwd.state.tx.us/huntwild/wild/species/whooper
Get involved. Help these magnificent birds survive:
http://www.tpwd.state.tx.us/huntwild/wild/wildlife_diversity/texas_nature_trackers/whooper-watch/
http://www.tpwd.state.tx.us/huntwild/wild/species/whooper/
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Texas' very own 'lil fantom ketteh:
Ocelot kittens
This beautiful little cat once ranged as far east as Arkansas and Louisiana, throughout Texas and in Mexico. Today ocelots are currently found only in extreme southern Texas and northeastern Mexico.
The remnant U.S. ocelot population in south Texas has declined from 80-120 individuals in 1995 to less than 50 in recent years, with about half of ocelot deaths resulting from being hit by automobiles. Most surviving Texas ocelots are in the shrub lands remaining at or near the Laguna Atascosa National Wildlife Refuge near Brownsville, where only 30-35 animals remain.
The ocelot is similar in appearance to a domestic cat although somewhat larger.
The ocelot ranges from 27 to 39 inches in length, plus 10 to 18 inches in tail length, and typically weighs 18 to 40 pounds.
Its fur resembles that of a clouded leopard or jaguar and was once regarded as very valuable. As a result, hundreds of thousands of ocelots were once killed for their fur. Hunting and loss of habitat have reduced these beautiful little cat's numbers to near extinction in North America. The Ocelot also usually gives birth to only one kitten although litters of two or three kittens also occur, but are not common. The small litter size and relative infrequency of breeding make the ocelot particularly vulnerable to extreme reduction in population.
http://www.tpwd.state.tx.us/publications/pwdpubs/media/pwd_bk_w7000_0013_ocelot.pdf.
http://wn.com/ocelot_survival__texas_parks_and_wildlife_[official]
What's being done to save the 'lil Texas ketteh:
http://vetmed.tamu.edu/research/highlights/janecka%E2%80%99s-efforts-to-save-the-ocelot-population-in-texas#.UwA5c_ldWSo
http://www.tpwd.state.tx.us/huntwild/wild/wildlife_diversity/texas_rare_species/listed_species/mammals.phtml
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Texas Tortoise
Texas Box Turtle
Most of us Texans used to catch and play with these docile little creatures when we were kids, but when was the last time you saw a Texas box turtle or a Texas tortoise? They used to be found everywhere it seems-backyards, ranches, along roadways but now they are now getting hard to find. Sadly, they are rapidly going the way of our beloved horned lizard- headed eventually for extinction unless we help them.
The Texas Parks and Wildlife request reports of any sightings:
http://www.gctts.org/BTPT/wild-sighting.html.
These animals are a unique tie to a period of Earth's history all but lost in the living world. Turtles are some of the oldest reptilian species on the earth, virtually unchanged in in 200 million years or more. These slow moving, toothless, egg-laying creatures date back to the dinosaurs, and still retain traits they used to survive then.
Their low reproductive rate, exploitation by pet suppliers, loss of habitation and overuse of pesticides and other things have lead to a severe drop in population of these creatures. They have been put on a threatened list, affording them protection from being taken, possessed, transported, exported, sold, or offered for sale.
Please do what you can to help save our Texas treasures.
http://www.texasturtles.org/Turtles.pdf
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I thought they were spread by the rising water and the floating debris pushed by a flooded river.
Sandhill Cranes are everywhere around here.
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Big, beautiful birds, too. They were almost wiped out by
idiot hunters, too- weren’t they?
I guess they slaughtered the cranes just for the fun of it.
You can’t eat one.
I know a lot of birds were slaughtered for their feathers for idiot women’s fashions.
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Our camera tends to blur things a little on 'zoom' but we've taken several pix of these magnificent birds each day. I snapped this one yesterday.....
I’ve always lived here in their summer grounds so they seem fairly common to me. I like to listen to them in the mornings. Their trumpeting sounds kind of prehistoric echoing through the fog.
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Aren’t the Ocelots gorgeous?
To think that they were slaughtered by the thousands for their fur!
They are building ‘animal passages’ (large tunnels under the roads) in the small corner of Texas where these precious little creatures are still hanging on.
Many of them have been killed by cars.
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Toads are still horney here.
cool..if you think of it, let us know.
We’ve been tickled to death to have a flock of 7 Whoopers spending time on our farm in southern Middle TN the past week.
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Wonderful! Keep a watch on them.
Good you notified the proper authorities. :)
Super cool video, but the author I’m talking about was American. I’m guessing the book was written in the 60’s or 70’s because I read it in the early 80’s as a kid and it was a fairly old book then.
Lucky you.
I have to drive to their refuge and pay a professional whooper watcher to take me out on his boat to observe them.
Yes. I’ve done that tummy rubbing thing too. I don’t remember what I was doing to the poor thing when it spit blood.
Gorgeous indeed. Glad people came to their senses about preserving them.
The media story here in Texas has been that they arrived in Mobil Alabama by freighter from South America some time in the 50s and have been spreading out from there.
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Again, I’m sorry I couldn’t make most of my links ‘live’.
I tired going by the instructions in one of the FR HTML instruction sites: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/938739/posts
but I just couldn’t make it work most of the time.
When I added what it said at the first and what it said at the end of the link, it just wiped the whole email address out. LOL
Wish somebody would explain this to me. :) I’m just not too good with HTML.
Anyway, please copy and paste the links I provided.
There’s a lot of great and fascinating information on Texas’ endangered species and what we can all do to help.
Katy
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but I just couldn’t make it work most of the time.
I am in Texas and I never heard that story.
They are destroying so much of our wildlife.
Have they spread all over Texas by now or what? It seems the last I read, they hadn't reached central Texas yet.
I guess you all heard about the young boy that was killed by fire ants during football practice here fairly recently:
There must be something they can do to eradicate these things!
The immediately put their house up for sale and moved to Utah.
There are things you can put on your yard but they aren't going to be eradicated on a large scale.
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