Whooping cranes are graceful looking birds with long, sinuous necks and long legs.
Their snowy white body feathers are accented by jet-black wingtips and a red and black head with a long, pointed beak. The whooping crane's call is a shrill, bugle-like trumpeting. Before settlers moved west, whooping cranes nested from Illinois to southern Canada, sharing their nesting grounds with the grizzly, bison and gray wolf. Whooping cranes migrated to areas extending from the Carolinas to Mexico to spend their winter. However, with the arrival of settlers moving west, much of the crane's nesting grounds were converted to pasture and agricultural lands and, like the grizzly, bison and wolf, the crane's numbers plummeted.