Cranes and Crabs

Whooping Crane at Aransas National
Wildlife Refuge, Texas

The Whooping Crane (Grus americana) is a comeback species. These cranes once ranged across North America. They were contemporaries of the great ice age animals like Giant Sloths, Mammoths and Dire Wolves. Whooping Crane fossils have been unearthed from California to Idaho to Florida. European settlers found these large birds numerous and delicious. Market hunting as well as habitat loss drove the Whooping Crane to near extinction. In the 1940s the Whooping Crane population in the wild was twenty-one birds. Now it exceeds 800.

Two adult Whooping Cranes in a marsh at Aransas

The last natural population of Whooping Cranes breeds in Northern Canada then migrates to Texas to winter in coastal marshes. Conservationists have established a new migratory population that breeds in Wisconsin and winters in Central Florida. Two new non-migratory Whooping Crane populations have also been established in Florida and Louisiana.

In November, Diane and I saw Whooping Cranes on their wintering grounds in the Aransas National Wildlife Refuge near Rockport, Texas. The day started by boarding Captain Tommy Moore’s boat the Skimmer. Upon leaving the boat harbor we entered Aransas Bay. The bay is brackish and shielded from the Gulf of Mexico by low barrier islands. Salt water from the Gulf enters the bay through Aransas Pass and Cedar Bayou.  The gulf water and mixes with freshwater that flows into the bay from the Aransas and Mission Rivers. Captain Tommy piloted the Skimmer past natural gas wells and oyster bars covered with pelicans. We soon reached a large marsh and Whooping Cranes were scattered about, feeding in small pools. Whooping Cranes are large birds, standing 5 feet tall and weighing up to 16 pounds. Adult cranes are white with black wingtips, a red crown and a dark, dagger-like beak.

Whooping Crane with freshly caught Blue Crab

Another crane another crab

In the Texas marshes, the cranes eat whatever they can catch, including frogs, fish, and mollusks. But, their favorite food seems to be Blue Crabs (Callinectes sapidis). The cranes stalk through shallow ponds in the marsh, probing with their beaks and stabbing their crab dinner. They then throw the crab up on the bank and eat it in pieces.

Someone asked me once what the rarest bird I had ever seen was. I did not have an answer because I do not think about birds in those terms. Now I have an answer. Whooping Cranes, those relics of the ice age, numbering in their hundreds, living on the edge of extinction and on the edge of the continent, are the rarest birds I have seen.