There is a beautiful essay in the New York Times today about whooping cranes. LINK
Whooping Cranes were one of the first animals I visited because we were saving them. The article discusses how, after WWII, only about 20 Whooping Cranes remained in the wild. In the early 1980s, I visited a wetlands site in Texas to see them (the Aransas National Wildlife Refuge). We did, in fact, see them, and they were magical.
Here is just a small quote about them from the article:
Those majestic white birds are the tallest in America — each standing five feet tall, with a wingspan of nearly seven feet — and we almost lost them forever. Never known to exist in large numbers, whooping cranes were nonetheless geographically widespread in North America until farming and hunting pushed them to the brink of extinction. By 1941, the worldwide population of whooping cranes numbered barely more than 20.
Even after decades of intense effort to help the species rebound — through a combination of habitat conservation and an innovative breed-and-release program — the total population of whooping cranes today is only around 800. So if you’re a whooping crane, and you need a flock for safety, you throw in your lot with the much more numerous sandhills.
