White-naped crane
The white-naped crane is a bird of the crane family. It is a large bird, long, approximately tall and weighing about with pinkish legs, grey and white striped neck, and a red face patch.
The white-naped crane breeds in northeastern Mongolia, northeastern China, and adjacent areas of southeastern Russia where a program at Khingan Nature Reserve raises eggs provided from U.S. zoos to bolster the species. Different groups of the birds migrate to winter near the Yangtze River, the DMZ in Korea and on Kyūshū in Japan. They also reach Kazakhstan and Taiwan. Only about 4,900 and 5,400 individuals remain in the wild.
Its diet consists mainly of insects, seeds, roots, plants and small animals.
Due to ongoing habitat loss and overhunting in some areas, the white-naped crane is evaluated as Vulnerable on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. It is listed on Appendix I and II of CITES.
In South Korea, It has been designated natural monument 203.
The white-naped crane was formerly placed in the genus Grus but a molecular phylogenetic study published in 2010 found that the genus, as then defined, was polyphyletic. In the resulting rearrangement to create monophyletic genera, four species, including the white-naped crane, were placed in the resurrected genus Antigone that had originally been erected by the German naturalist Ludwig Reichenbach in 1853.
