Troubled Waters: Whooping Cranes
Passport to Texas from Texas Parks and Wildlife
[Whooping crane calls]
Last winter, twenty-three out of two hundred and seventy whooping cranes died after a decline in blue crab and wolfberries, two of the crane’s main food sources.
Tom Stehn is the whooping crane coordinator for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Services. He says the decline is linked to two sources: drought and diversion of Texas rivers.
The human consumption of water has been increasing annually as the population of South Texas grows. This is a very critical issue for the bays that in some way we need to figure out a mechanism so sufficient freshwater inflows reach the bays to keep them productive.
Stehn says the fate of the whooping crane could rest in the hands of Texans.
There are management actions that people will have to do such as conserve water. And those are the choices that Texans have to make.
And many new threats are coming onto the scene.
As issues get worse for the whooping cranes, inflow issues, housing development issues, wind energy development, possibly taking away habitat from the cranes in migration. There’s a lot of threats out there right now, so I’m really leery of how the whooping cranes are going to do in the future.
The good news is there are sixty-one nesting pairs of cranes, which make some researchers hopeful that the population will increase next year.
That’s our show…with research and writing help from Gretchen Mahan. For Texas Parks and Wildlife I’m
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