Whooping Crane: Images from the Wild

Excellent look into the lives and nesting behavior of America's tallest bird, the majestic Whooping Crane. Very good price that I was glad to find.

This is a chance to spend a year with the most endangered cranes in the world. The photographs are remarkable.

This book is a world premiere: stunning photos from the life and breeding site of the Whooping Crane, the charismatic and still extremely rare North American bird and legendary flagship of global nature conservation. Working on an assignment for the National Geographic Society, and with the permission of the Canadian nature protection agency, the nature photographer Klaus Nigge is the first of his guild ever to be allowed to photograph a breeding pair of this beautiful crane at the nest. The necessary security precautions were about the same level as those for the protection of a U.S. president. The "Whooper" is classed as highly endangered on the basis of its still very small population. In 1938 there were only 15 adults, whose breeding grounds were unknown, so protection efforts were at first concentrated only on the birds' wintering site, the Aransas National Wildlife Refuge on the Texas coast. It was only in 1954, and by pure coincidence, that breeding birds were found. From his plane a bush pilot saw a white dot in the remote swamps of the Canadian Wood Buffalo National Park: it was a breeding Grus americana. The entire wild breeding population is still concentrated in this one National Park. Since then, effective protection of this long-lived though slow-breeding bird has been easier. In 2007 a new maximum of 65 active nests were counted from the air.The informative text section of this volume has been kept brief. The book's focus is on the photographs, and they are a true cornucopia of images from the annual cycle of this majestic bird, from breeding site to winter quarters. Each photo is a document, at the same time biologically informative and incredibly beautiful. Every single one allows us a glimpse into the unknown life of one of the world's rarest birds, together with the experience of something that is almost extinct on our Earth, a fragment of truly untouched and intact nature. This is a weighty book, and not only in the sense of its serious content. I can say with confidence that this volume is one of the most beautiful bird books that I have ever seen.Karl Schulze-Hagen

I think it doesn't get any cuter - a beautiful book with beautiful color photos of an endangered species. Let's hope that Operation Migration and the other folks working to save them have wonderful success.