Organizing for Endangered and Threatened Species Habitat

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readily available (Matthiessen 2001; Walkinshaw 1973). Whooping cranes have come to symbolize a variety of things in different cultures around the world: conservation, royal beauty, and wilderness. They now have become the majoi- symbol of a proposed reorganization of water in the three states of the Platte river basin. The population of whooping cranes, prior to European settlement of North America, has been estimated to have been about 15, 000 (Mattlxiessen 2001,p. 274). They once ranged along the Atlantic seaboard as did the sandhill. However, as Europeans settlement increased, their numbers decreased. Very edible and of great size, whooping cranes were decimated by rifles and shotguns of the settler-hunter. In 1860, the whooping crane population was estimated by some to be in the range of 1,300 to 1,400 birds, while others estimated as few as 500 - 700 individuals (Allen 1952). During the nineteenth century the whooper retreated to west of the Mississippi, and by 1880 was a rare bird everywhere. A non-migratory population in south-west Louisiana fell to disease in 1940, and soon became extinct. By 1941 the number of individuals in the recorded migrating wild population had declined to 16 with only 6 to 8 breeding birds (LT.S. Fish & Wildlife Service 1997a). The whooping crane population has rebounded a bit because of habitat acquisition, federal protection, and intense management of breeding and wintering areas. By 1987, 136 birds were in the wild, and populations fluctuated around that number until 1995 when a peak wintering population of 158 birds was recorded (U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service 1997a). In 1998 about 200 whooping cranes made up the North Ainerican mid-continent flock, out of 400 worldwide many of which are in captivity. Whooping Cranes remain the rarest of the world's 15 crane species. The Big Bend stretch of the Platte river in central Nebraska has presented an extremely favorable combination of habitat types, hosting bald eagles, peregrine falcons, over 10 million ducks and geese, eskimo curlew, and for a brief period in each spring over a half million sandhill cranes along with their rare cousins, the few whooping cranes. The area beiween Lexington and Chapman is witness to over eighty percent of the world's sandhill cranes spending 4 to 6 weeks in spring, resting dancing and feeding before continuing the migration north. As they rise from their shallow river channel habitat at daybreak and return at sunset, the almost one half million sandhill cranes put on one of the great natural wildlife shows on the planet. Although whooping cranes do not breed on the Platte, they, along with over 300 other species of migrating birds use the Platte seasonally, of which 125 nest along its banks (Grooms 1991: 20). The entire natural flock of whooping cranes are believed to migrate through Nebraska between the wintering grounds at Aransas National Wildlife Refuge 10, Figure 3 Crane Migration Flyway