Wired! Black Crowned Crane

The International Crane Foundation in Baraboo, WI maintains a collection of captive cranes, including several black crowned cranes, which helps their work in crane preservation: captive breeding and reintroduction into the wild. Their work also demonstrates endangered species management for the public, and facilitates breeding and education information elsewhere in the United States and abroad. It is the only place in the world where you can see all 15 crane species.

Black Crowned Crane

When I visited the Crane Foundation earlier this month, this crane was especially interested in my camera, and made several attempts to get a little too close. Maybe I didn’t ask for the appropriate model release!

The Black Crowned Crane is indigenous to the Sahel region of Africa. The ICF in coordination with Wetlands International has coordinated a conservation plan for these birds. There are approximately 40,000 Black Crowned Cranes in existence, and their numbers are declining.

The most serious threats to this crane species are illegal capture for the pet industry. An ancient tradition in West Africa to keep domesticated cranes in the household compounds persists to this day. But an additional threat is an intensified international trade in the birds in the last 30 years. Also degradation of the species’ habitat – the wetlands and grasslands of West Africa due to drought, destruction of tree cover and overgrazing – is a factor in their declining numbers.

A regional African program has been set up to provide alternative income opportunities for crane traders and for distribution of community-based information and conservation methods in Nigeria and the Sudan.

The Crane Foundation is currently in a re-building program, and many of the exhibits are closed. The new exhibits will open next spring.

A Lazy Midsummer Hike in Door County

The meadows are sprinkled with white, yellow and purple wildflowers at mid-summer in Door County, the northeastern tip of Wisconsin. (For you newbies to Wisconsin geography, if you pretend to make a hand print with your left hand, the print rather resembles Wisconsin and your thumb is Door County which juts into Lake Michigan.) We went for an easy hike through the Ephraim Preserves on the edge of the village of Ephraim. The trail circles the Andersen Lake (really more of a marsh than a lake) and meanders through meadows and hardwood forests.

Queen Anne’s Lace, often a flower that is everyone’s favorite, is also a rather madly spreading lady and when coming head to head with natural plants, she is often victor. Therefore she has earned the label ecologically-invasive, though most everyone enjoys her beauty. I particularly like to capture the plant not in bloom. I, more than once, have tried to pluck a “dark” spot or “insect” from the flower’s center, before remembering that is one of her trademarks – a tiny dark floret in the very center of all her white finery.

— Bo Mackison loves to capture the beauty of wildflowers in Wisconsin with her camera. More wildflowers photos from Door County can be viewed in her gallery at Seeded Earth Photography.