Largest Bird Of India

The sarus crane is the India's tallest flying bird; a large male may stand six feet tall. There are three recognized subspecies of the sarus crane. The Indian sarus cranes live, as their name implies, predominately in Asia's subcontinent. In areas dominated by the Hindu religion, the Indian sarus suffers little persecution. They have, as a result, lost much of their fear of humans and often nest in rice paddies where they are regarded as omens for good crops, especially in India.

Eastern sarus cranes were once abundant in Southeast Asia, but after decades of war they are missing from most of their former range. The few that remain nest in Cambodia in small wetlands surrounded by dry forest, but migrate to Viet Nam's lower Mekong Delta to winter at the Tram Chim National Reserve. There is a smaller non-migratory population, discovered by ICF staff in 1996, that lives in Myanmar's Irrawaddy delta. The third subspecies is the Australian sarus crane.

Range: Northern and central India, southeastern Pakistan, southern Myanmar, Cambodia, southern Laos, Viet Nam, and northern Australia. The Philippine population of sarus cranes is probably extinct.

Status: Despite cultural and religious protections, sarus cranes are vulnerable in most areas. Roughly 8,000 to 10,000 Indian sarus remain, though the population is declining due to the loss of wetlands and increasing amounts of pollution as the human population continues to grow. The greatest concentration of Indian sarus cranes occur where land use practices have changed little from traditional patterns. Some fear that the whole wetland food web on which sarus cranes depend may be under stress as pesticides and fertilizers become more widespread in the subcontinent's rural areas. Even in India's Keoladeo National Park, the number of sarus nests has decreased since the early 1980s.

The Eastern sarus population in Southeast Asia is estimated at 500 to 1,500 birds. This subspecies is subject to hunting, pollution, warfare, heavy use of pesticides, and development of the Mekong River. A rapidly growing human population threatens to overwhelm areas that these cranes rely on. There is also trade in and hunting of both chicks and adult birds in some areas.

The Irrawaddy population is very small, perhaps as few as a hundred birds and not very well known, since it wasn't discovered by ICF staff until 1996.

The Australian sarus population is roughly estimated at about 5,000 birds, but has never been accurately surveyed. The flock may be expanding due to increase in grasslands as a result of deforestation. It was thought at one time that sarus cranes were a relatively recent arrival to Australia, but now it is thought that they have been there for several centuries.