Journey North Whooping Crane Migration

Whooping Crane

What Predators Go For Cranes?

Hear Ranger Jennifer Rabuck talk more about predators:
text for AUDIO CLIP

Ranger Jennifer Rabuck

Here in Wisconsin there's a couple of different species that may be even happier to see the Whooping cranes than we are, and those sorts of animals are called predators. They would like to taste the cranes and see how good they are from a Wisconsin perspective. The animals that we really have to watch for here at Necedah Refuge are things like timberwolves and coyotes and raccoons, weasels, and also you have the flying birds like eagles and owls and the larger hawks. So we have to take a look at the pen and figure out a way to make sure that the birds will be safe here on our site — not only from humans, but from the predators that are out there.

We do that in a couple of ways. There's some electric fencing that goes around the entire enclosure: one strand that goes up very high in the top of the pen, and one strand that goes down very low at the bottom of the pen. There's also a wire that's buried into the ground around the entire pen so that if a predator wanted to try to dig underneath the fencing, they'd hit this wire and wouldn't be able to get underneath the pen. On top of the entire pen we put what's called flight netting. Basically it looks like a big volleyball net that's stretched real tight over the entire enclosure so that nothing could crawl up or fly in and get the birds and also it does help keep the birds in where it is safer.

Where we keep the birds at night it's a wooden enclosure so that it's even more secure than their day pen where they're out during the daytime which is just a mesh netting.

Down in Florida they have a couple additional predators. They have things like alligators and bobcats. Those are probably the number one and two predators. And the third one would also be snakes. Snakes predominantly would eat any Whooping crane eggs or smaller chicks. And so our cranes won't have to worry about it until they're old enough to have families of their own.