Posted on 12/15/2004 6:33:43 AM PST by SwinneySwitch
Once again Mother Nature has chosen a species
to endure.
Whooping crane ping!
Careful, we have a lot of "gun nuts" on FR! LOL Just kidding guys. Please no hate mail. : )
BTTT!!!!!!!
Original recipe or extra-crispy?
I've never seen these birds.... Sometime I'm going to have to take a trip down that way and take a boat ride and maybe get a chance to see them... They must be something to see in flight........ 7 foot wing span... thanks for the ping
enviro-con ping!
Dulce Cumpean, a student at Port Lavaca's Travis Middle School, and Darrin Welchert, a biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, use a spotting scope and binoculars Monday to take a gander at snow geese, sandhill cranes, northern pintail ducks and other birds during a tour of the Aransas National Wildlife Refuge's Myrtle F. Whitmire preserve near Indianola. The tour, taken by 27 Port Lavaca students, was sponsored by the Fish and Wildlife Service, which manages the refuge, and the Guadalupe-Blanco River Trust, a group dedicated to resource conservation in the Guadalupe River Basin.
Aransas State Park is great. We were down there a few years ago and it was toward the end of there stay. We only saw a couple from a distance, but they are awesome!
"When a whooping crane wants to mate or bond with another whooper, its crown becomes bright red. The crane struts around in a high-stepping march and shows off its beautiful plumage. The crane tries to "invite" another bird with its body language. Ruffling its feathers, growling, stomping its feet, and tossing its head in various displays is the "come on." If another crane is interested, it will mimic the first crane's movements. Then the two will dance side by side. Eventually the two cranes will create a duet with a sequence of calls that lasts between 15 and 40 seconds. This duet is called a unison call. Its purpose is to release tensions and help the two birds bond. When whooping cranes prepare to mate, they leap, bow, run around, and throw sticks in the air. Cranes are famous for their dancing."
We used to see them from time to time up in Idaho. Gray's lake is another breeding area.
...tastes like Condor.
BTTT!!!!!!!
The Eastern flock summers in Wisconsin and winters in FL.
The new group follows an ultra light down each fall.
http://www.savingcranes.org/
Wonderful story. Gorgeous, majestic birds. May their success in breeding continue.
We saw the cranes last year, but stayed land bound there at the refuge. Maybe this year we'll take a boat tour to get a better view.
"They" tried to start up a second migratory flock by having sand hill cranes hatch out and raise the whoopers. The whooping cranes had an identity crisis and never could figure out who they were and did not mate. Don't know if they have all died out or not. Saw one or two of them with the sandhill cranes in the New Mexico refuge - where they winter over, in the late 80s.
The story of the ultralight guided birds from Wisconsin is quite interesting. The birds are usually quite solitary and typically migrate in family groups - probable no more than three or four, maybe sometimes with a bunch of the smaller sandhills. "They" train the birds to follow the ultralights as a flock and take the young ones to Florida and then leave them pretty much on their own. This year there was one whose flight feathers did not grow in right. I don't know what they did, but they must have plucked it and new feathers grew in. By that time it was too late to train for the ultralights. They dumped him out in Wisconsin near an older whooper. When the older one decided it was too cold to stay on in the north country, he and the young one left, but the older one flew about 50 miles further than the baby. By chance the young one landed near a second whooper. The episode was repeated the second day with the young one again landing short. The next part of the story was that the young one was spotted half way to Florida - apparently following some sandhill cranes.
I saw one on the farm in Nebraska 40-50 miles southwest of Linclon in the late 40s. It had stopped overnight in the flat area south of our farm place.
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