Siberian cranes give India a miss

 

NEW DELHI: Keoladeo National Park, India's most reputed bird sanctuary, no longer receives one of its most famous winter visitor, the Siberian Crane.

 

According to a report of the World Wide Foundation for nature (WWF), increasing drought situations owing to higher temperature is one factor that resulted in a subpopulation of the Siberian cranes.

 

The Siberian crane is a critically endangered migratory wetland bird numbering merely 3,000 worldwide, the report said. The bird's Arctic tundra habitat is due to decline by 70 per cent owing to global warming, meteorologists said.

 

The Siberain Crane is now only found in two populations — the eastern and western. The Central Population of Siberian Cranes nested on the riparian lowlands of the Kunovat River in western Siberia.

 

They traditionally migrated 5,000 km southeast over the Russian Federation, Kazakhistan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, before arriving at their wintering grounds in northwest India. Keoladeo National Park (KNP) in Rajasthan had been a major wintering area for Siberian Cranes.  Counts at KNP showed a steady decline from about 80 birds in the 1960s to just a single pair in winter 2001/02, and none since then.

 

There is a high probability that the population has recently been extirpated. All, but a few existing birds belong to the eastern population, which breed in north eastern Siberia and in winter along the middle Yangtze River in China. The western population winters at a single site along the south coast of the Caspian Sea in Iran and breeds just south of the Ob River.