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The wattled crane is a large bird found in Africa, south of the Sahara Desert. It is sometimes placed in the monotypic genus Bugeranus.
The first formal description of the wattled crane was by the German naturalist Johann Friedrich Gmelin in 1789 under the binomial name Ardea carunculata Gmelin based his account on the "wattled heron" that had been described and illustrated by the English ornithologist John Latham in 1785. The specific epithet is from the Latin caruncula meaning "a small piece of flesh".
The wattled crane was formerly placed in its own genus Bugeranus. A molecular phylogenetic study published in 2010 found that the genus Grus within the crane family was not monophyletic and that the wattled crane was a sister species to a clade containing the blue crane and the demoiselle crane. In the resulting reorganization of the genera, the wattled crane was moved to the genus Grus. Some taxonomists retain the wattled crane within Bugeranus. The wattled crane is monotypic: there are no recognised subspecies.
Wattled cranes inhabit fairly inaccessible wetlands under most conditions. It requires shallow marsh-like habitats with a good deal of sedge-based vegetation. All cranes are omnivorous. The principal food of the wattled crane is mainly aquatic eating the tubers and rhizomes of submerged sedges and water lilies. It is one of the more herbivorous of extant cranes. The other primary portion of the diet consists of aquatic insects. They will supplement the diet with snails, amphibians and snakes when the opportunity arises. Roughly 90% of foraging done by this species occurs in shallow waters. They typically forage by digging vigorously with their bill into the muddy soil. On occasion, it will eat grain and grass seed as well, but does so much less often than the other three African crane species. Animal planet | Discovery | Netflix | Documentary | Animal World
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