Dark Recht, age 11, of Ft, Wayne, Ind., for his question:
What does the whooping crane look like?
He is big and he is beautiful and his feathers are white as the whitest snow. He is a brave and princely bird and he is called the whooping crane because his loud call echoes like a bugle. In 1916, there wore only 14 of these great birds left in the world and our government is still working hard to keep the whooping crane and his family from extinction.
He stands five feet tall on a pair of spindly black legs. From a distance, his huge body looks like a soft, white summer cloud. The wild whooping crane is not fond of human company and few people get near him. Seven w hoopers live pampered lives in captivity. Some of them have become quite tame and we can study them in detail.
The two parent birds are dressed alike, though the female is a little smaller and daintier than the male. The father bird's glaring yellow eyes inform us that he is the boss of the family and he would give his life to protect his precious wife and chick. His black moustache adds to his fierce, regal expression.
The great wings of the big crane are tipped with glossy feathers of bet black. In flight, he looks like a graceful ship sweeping through the sky on a pair of snow white, black tipped sails. The wings are wide and the wing spread is seven feat. Some people have 3oen the wild whooping cranes in flight as they migrate between their summer and winter homes. Their summer nesting ground is near Great Slave Lake in northern Canada and their winter home is the Aransas Bird Refuge on the Gulf shore of Texas.
Only 30 Whooping Cranes Return to the Aransas Bird Refuge – so read a headline of November 1961.
This was sad, because the flock which left for Canada the previous April had numbered 36, Then, in February 1962, the Department of the Interior gave us the happy news that five more whoopers had been counted. The next week, the news was even better. The flock in their winter residence now numbered 38.
In April they left for their far northern nesting grounds and the first of them will be arriving back in late . With them, we hope, will be a few more youngsters. The parent whoopers mate for life and they have a strong sense of family privacy. On the bird refuge, each family claims a domain of about 400 acres. Any trespasser, be he a human being or another crane, is greeted with a frightening Kerloo ker lee oo. The whooping bugle call is loud enough to be heard a mile away.
Junior is but five months old when he makes the long migration flight with his parents. He is downy pink or rusty red. By spring he is almost as big as his parents. He then has him white plumage axed a rusty cap of feathers on his head. The rod bald patch and the black moustaches will come later.