Siberian Crane

Siberian cranes are widely dispersed in their breeding areas and are highly territorial. They maintain feeding territories in winter but may form small and loose flocks, and gather closer at their winter roosts. They are very diurnal, feeding almost all throughout the day. When feeding on submerged vegetation, they often immerse their heads entirely underwater. When calling, the birds stretch their neck forward. The contexts of several calls have been identified and several of these vary with sex. Individual variation is very slight and most calls have a dominant frequency of about 1.4 kHz. The unison calls, duets between paired males and female however are more distinctive with marked differences across pairs. The female produces a higher pitched call which is the "loo" in the duetted "doodle-loo" call. Pairs will walk around other pairs to threaten them and drive them away from their territory. In captivity, one individual was recorded to have lived for nearly 62 years while another lived for 83 years.

The breeding area of the Siberian crane formerly extended between the Urals and Ob river south to the Ishim and Tobol rivers and east to the Kolyma region. The populations declined with changes in landuse, the draining of wetlands for agricultural expansion and hunting on their migration routes. The breeding areas in modern times are restricted to two widely disjunct regions. The western area in the river basins of the Ob, Konda and Sossva and to the east a much larger population in Yakutia between the Yana and the Alazeya rivers. Like most cranes, the Siberian crane inhabits shallow marshlands and wetlands and will often forage in deeper water than other cranes. They show very high site fidelity for both their wintering and breeding areas, making use of the same sites year after year. The western population winters in Iran and some individuals formerly wintered in India south to Nagpur and east to Bihar. The eastern populations winter mainly in the Poyang Lake area in China.

The status of this crane is critical and the world population is estimated to be around 3200–4000, nearly all of them belonging to the eastern breeding population. Of the 15 crane species, this is one of the most threatened (the Whooping Crane of North America, with only 750 living individuals as of 2018, is rarer.) The western population has dwindled to 4 in 2002 and was thought to be extirpated but one 1 individual was seen in Iran in 2010. The wintering site at Poyang in China holds an estimated 98% of the population and is threatened by hydrological changes caused by the Three Gorges Dam and other water development projects. Historic records from India suggest a wider winter distribution in the past including records from Gujarat, near New Delhi and even as far east as Bihar. In 1974 as many as 75 birds wintered in Bharatpur and this declined to a single pair in 1992 and the last bird was seen in 2002. In the 19th century, larger numbers of birds were noted to visit India. They were sought after by hunters and specimen collectors. An individual that escaped from a private menagerie was shot in the Outer Hebrides in 1891. The western population may even have wintered as far west as Egypt along the Nile. Satellite telemetry was used to track the migration of a flock that wintered in Iran. They were noted to rest on the eastern end of the Volga delta. Satellite telemetry was also used to track the migration of the eastern population in the mid-1990s, leading to the discovery of new resting areas along the species' flyway in eastern Russia and China. The Siberian crane is one of the species to which the Agreement on the Conservation of African-Eurasian Migratory Waterbirds (AEWA) applies and is subject of the Memorandum of Understanding concerning Conservation Measures for the Siberian Crane concluded under the Bonn Convention.