Endangered
Whooping crane
Grus americana
After being pushed to the brink of extinction by unregulated hunting and loss of habitat that left just 21 wild (and two captive) cranes by 1941, the whooping crane made a partial recovery through conservation efforts.
Appearance
An adult whooping crane is white with a red crown and a long, dark, pointed bill. Even so, immature whooping cranes are cinnamon brown.
Published measurements include mass about 7.497.
Range and habitat
At one time, the range for the whooping crane extended throughout midwestern North America as well as southward to Mexico. By the mid-20th century, the muskeg of the taiga in Wood Buffalo National Park, Alberta and Northwest Territories, Canada, and the surrounding area had become the last remnant of the former nesting habitat of the Whooping Crane Summer Range. Even so, with the recent Whooping Crane Eastern Partnership Reintroduction Project, whooping cranes nested naturally for the first time in 100 years in the Necedah National Wildlife Refuge in central Wisconsin, United States, and these have subsequently expanded their summer range in Wisconsin and surrounding states, while reintroduced experimental non-migratory populations have nested in Florida and Louisiana.
Initial challenges getting the resultant birds to reproduce, even using artificial insemination approaches, would give impetus to the first, unsuccessful attempt at reintroduction, by swapping whooping crane eggs into the nests of the more numerous sandhill cranes as a way to establish a backup population. To address the potential of future crowding that may result from the increasing migratory population, in 2012 and following years, purchases of small plots of land and acquisition of conservation easements covering larger areas has led to the protection of tens of thousands of additional acres of potential coastal habitat near the Aransas reserve.
Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.
Diet and breeding
Only the red-crowned crane may have a more carnivorous diet among living cranes. In their Texas wintering grounds, this species feeds on various crustaceans, mollusks, grasshoppers, fish (such as eel), small reptiles (such as snakes), mice, voles, aquatic plants, acorns and fruits (such as wolfberry ).
Potential foods of breeding birds in summer include frogs, snakes, small rodents, small birds, fish (such as minnows), aquatic insects, crayfish, clams, snails, aquatic tubers, and berries. Waste grain, among them wheat, barley, and corn, is an important food for migrating whooping cranes, but they do not swallow gizzard stones. They digest grain less efficiently than sandhill cranes. This includes about 560 individuals in the remnant population that migrates between coastal Texas, USA, and the Northwest Territories, Canada, that is termed the "Aransas-Wood Buffalo Population" after the protected areas that anchor the population's wintering and breeding ranges, respectively.
In crisis
After being pushed to the brink of extinction by unregulated hunting and loss of habitat that left just 21 wild (and two captive) cranes by 1941, the whooping crane made a partial recovery through conservation efforts. The total number of cranes in the surviving migratory population, plus three reintroduced flocks and in-captivity, is just over 830 birds as of 2025. Additionally, there are about 140 individuals in two reintroduced populations breeding in Wisconsin and Louisiana, USA, and an additional 130 individuals in captivity.
Whooping cranes are believed to have been naturally rare, and major population declines caused by habitat destruction and overhunting led them to become critically endangered. The population went from an estimated 10,000+ birds before the settling of Europeans on the continent to 1,300-1,400 birds by 1870.
CITES lists this taxon on Appendix I. Confirm the current appendix on the CITES checklist.
Whooping crane is Endangered on this catalog because that is the IUCN category stored on Wikidata. Confirm the official criteria and any later count on iucnredlist.org.
Sources
Written for this catalog from the English Wikipedia article on Whooping crane, Wikidata item Q457477. Family and order context is original field-guide writing about the group, not a copied assessment of this one species. Wikipedia text is CC BY-SA. Not an IUCN assessment. Counts, when quoted, can change — confirm them on the recovery programme and on iucnredlist.org.
