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The Nonessential Whooping Crane

10,000 Birds

Another 170 are in captivity, many of them breeding stock for reintroduction efforts. You can designate it thus; you can legally call it a Rhode Island Red chicken if you want, but no whooping crane on this planet is nonessential. There are 400 whooping cranes left in the wild, 100 of them in the eastern population.

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