National Wildlife Magazine - Texas: A Tail of Two Cranes - Whooping and Sandhill - "Yet guaranteeing adequate water for wildlife in the Guadalupe and other Texas rivers remains a daunting challenge. “Each year the [state’s human] population jumps, and we use more and more water” (No matter how otherwise heroic their efforts, mainstream environmental groups must come to the realization that overpopulation is the main conflagration that will finally rub out the environment, and that the open-borders policies of all Western nations are throwing gasoline onto that conflagration.)

A Tail of Two Cranes

Threatened by water diversions, both sandhill and whooping cranes have benefited from decades of work by NWF and its partners

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Whoopers



Sandhills

Watch workers go about the job of habitat enhancement on 

Nebraska’s Platte River and the words “tough love” come to 

mind.

Heavy-equipment operators grind their way through eastern 

red cedar and other woody vegetation on the river’s banks 

and sandbars and then disk the river bottom to tear at roots. 

“Then we pray for heavy rains and some moderate floods or pulse flows that can come in behind us and wash the unwanted growth and vegetation downriver,” says Jeff Oates, spokesman for the Crane Trust, a nonprofit group set up by NWF, the state of Nebraska and the Missouri Basin Power Project in the 1970s to protect and maintain habitat for whooping cranes, sandhill cranes and other migratory birds that seek refuge along this stretch of the Platte each spring.

There was a time when the Platte didn’t need help staying shipshape. Spring floods from Rocky Mountain snowmelt scoured away encroaching plant life before it became established, preserving the river’s sandbars and shoreline as inviting habitat for migratory cranes and other birds. But as dams and other water-control structures went up along the river and its tributaries during the past century, the Platte’s power was harnessed for irrigation, electricity generation, drinking water and other uses. Overall flow in the Central 

Platte shrank by nearly 70 percent, and human intervention became necessary to mitigate the effects of man’s engineering marvels upstream. ...

http://www.nwf.org/News-and-Magazines/National-Wildlife/Birds/Archives/2014/Cranes.aspx