World Water Day

Last month we shared information about World Wetlands Day, an annual celebration of our global wetlands. On March 22 the United Nations is sponsoring World Water Day focusing on our global fresh water resources. This year's theme is Shared Water - Shared Opportunities and focuses on transboundary water resources, such as the lakes or rivers and even underground aquifers that cross political boundaries. To learn more about this event, visit the World Water Day website. You can download a World Water Day video focusing on the Nile River, posters, send a World Water Day e-card and view an online image gallery.

Similar to our water resources, cranes also cross political boundaries during their annual migrations, and we are waiting to see where our two banded Siberian Cranes migrate this spring. We have received limited location data from both cranes over the past two weeks. Our last location for Neya, the crane in Iran, was approx. 240 km to the northwest of her release site, which may indicate that she has started to migrate (click on the map to the right to view a map of the cranes' current locations). We're hopeful that we will receive new data from her transmitter, so that we can learn where she will spend the spring and summer. Meanwhile, we are also waiting to confirm if Bai He, our banded Siberian Crane wintering in the Poyang Lake Basin, has begun his migration. We will post updates on the cranes' locations as we learn more.


We've received requests from you for images of the three white cranes (Whooping, Siberian and Red-crowned Cranes) to incorporate into your classroom activities. You can download images on the International Crane Foundation's online photo gallery, and I wanted to pass along a link for a site that I recently discovered - ARKive: Images of life on Earth. The site includes background information, images and videos of our three white cranes. Click on the links below to view these pages*

Whooping Crane

Siberian Crane

Red-crowned Crane

*Note that according to the ARKive website "Teachers, educators, researchers and students may incorporate these materials [images and video] into their lesson plans, presentations, work sheets, projects etc in hard copy and digital format for internal educational use."