SHOULD SANDHILL CRANES BE HUNTED?
by Whit Gibbons
January 9, 2011
"The state of Kentucky is considering a change in its game regulations that will allow hunting of sandhill cranes." My first reaction upon reading that statement was "It's a game bird? Can you even eat a sandhill crane?" The answer to that second question is "of course." At various times in various places, people have probably eaten every kind of animal they have been able to kill. Sandhill cranes certainly would not be the exception to the rule.
Indeed, the state wildlife agency in Kansas, one of the states where sandhill cranes are already hunted as a game species, says that "crane meat is considered excellent table fare, probably the best of all migratory game birds." A friend even gave me a recipe for the big birds--a concoction of soy sauce, brown sugar, minced garlic and cayenne pepper. The only edible part of the sandhill crane is the breast, but the recipe calls it the "flying rib eye of the sky." OK, so one part of this magnificent migratory bird that is larger than a great blue heron is edible.
But does being good to eat in itself qualify a species for legal hunting? I imagine there were many fine recipes for the now-extinct passenger pigeon.
Like many other North American birds, sandhill crane populations dipped drastically when European settlers came to the New World. The climb back since the mid-1900s has been steady, and current estimates set the number of birds at more than a half million. The U.S. Geological Survey states that sandhill cranes are now "the most abundant of the world's cranes." To learn what a sandhill crane looks and sounds like, go to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology website www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Sandhill_Crane/id.
Some land managers maintain that keeping the number of cranes trimmed down is important because "if concentrations become too high the risk of disease increases." This paradigm may be reasonable for some game species in some situations, but these migratory species did quite well in enormous numbers before people arrived on the scene to "take care of them." The International Crane Foundation states that "limited data . . . suggest that crane populations do stop growing without the need for hunting. . . .
ICF data show that the eastern population of sandhill cranes is large enough for a sustainable harvest to occur."
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service...
http://www.uga.edu/srel/ecoviews/ecoview110109.htm
It isn't just Kentucky.