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Demoiselle Crane — printable fact sheet
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Demoiselle Crane
Anthropoides virgo
Anthropoides virgo is the smallest of the world's cranes and the one that takes on the hardest journey. Populations breeding on the steppes of Mongolia, Kazakhstan and Central Asia migrate to wintering grounds in India and Africa, and to get there they must cross the Himalaya — …
Did you know?
- Unlike most other cranes, Demoiselle Cranes can be seen in large flocks numbering thousands during migration and at wintering sites.
- Demoiselle cranes are the only cranes routinely recorded flying at altitudes where oxygen is roughly half of sea-level pressure, and their blood haemoglobin binds oxygen efficiently enough to make it possible. Pairs bond for life and perform a leaping, wing-flapping dance that is used both in courtship and to defuse tension in the flock. Chicks are precocial, leaving the scrape within about a day and following the parents on foot across open steppe. At Khichan the daily grain feeding has grown from one family's effort in the 1970s into an event that draws thousands of birds each winter.
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