Abstract

he purpose of this work is to provide a method for individual recognition of crane pairs and crane individuals for long-term monitoring and gathering of individual life history facts without the need to capture and band them. Results in various regions and with various crane species will be described. In addition to the monitoring capability the method opened the possibility of analysis cranes' vocal communication and regionally specific "language" structures. The method is practically applied also in projects for the protection of endangered crane species, predominantly the Whooping crane, and here also in the raising and training of captive reared cranes for release into the wild and ultraleight airplane-led migration.