A beautiful but exceedingly wary bird which is becoming increasingly rare in its West African strongholds. This is a different species from the more numerous Grey Crowned Crane of Eastern & Southern Africa being a bird of the Sahel & Sudan savanna regions. Sadly the population is in freefall primarily through habitat destruction & drying out of the wetlands on which it depends. In Nigeria the population was in excess of 15,000 in the 1970s but today there is barely a handfull of birds left!!