Endangered Whopping crane

Description:

There are a pair of endangered whooping cranes residing at the Ellie Schiller Homosassa Springs Wildlife State Park, Homosassa, Florida. Once very close to extinction, the whooping crane is making a comeback. The tallest bird in North America, the whooping crane stands 5 feet tall with a long, sinuous neck and long legs. Its snowy white body feathers are accented by jet-black wingtips and a red and black head with a long, pointed beak. The wings measure about 7 feet across. Whooping cranes fly with slow wingbeats and the necks and legs fully extended. The whooping crane's call, from which it derives its name, has been described as a shrill, bugle-like trumpeting.

Habitat:

There are a pair of endangered whooping cranes residing at the Ellie Schiller Homosassa Springs Wildlife State Park, Homosassa, Florida

Notes:

Since whooping cranes normally lay two eggs but only raise one chick, in one experiment, Canadian and American biologists removed the "extra" eggs from nests in the wild and brought them to the Patuxent Wildlife Research Center in Laurel, Maryland, where they were artificially incubated and later used to establish a captive flock. From 1967 through the present, many "extra" eggs have been transferred from the wild to the Patuxent center and other whooping crane captive breeding facilities. In February 1993, a nonmigratory flock of 14 captive-reared whooping cranes was reintroduced on the Kissimmee Prairie in Florida. Since then, several more birds have been released at this site.