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Every winter, tens of thousands of Demoiselle Cranes cross the Himalaya from their breeding grounds in Central Asia and Mongolia, dropping down into Rajasthan to escape the cold. This waterhole is one of their stopovers — birds packed shoulder to shoulder on the bank, more still wading in the shallows. The crane is easy to pick out even at a distance: pale grey body, a long black neck striped with a drooping tuft of black feathers at the chest, and a white plume sweeping back from the red eye. It's the smallest of the world's cranes, but in a flock this size that hardly matters — the sheer number is the spectacle. Rajasthan has become famous for exactly this scene, where villagers have fed and protected the birds for generations, and the cranes now arrive by the thousands each year without
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