Just 10 years ago, spotting a gray crowned crane in Rwanda’s wetlands had become a rarity. These elegant birds — tall and statuesque, with golden plumes fanning from their heads — once flourished across East Africa. But by the middle of the last decade, their numbers in Rwanda had collapsed drastically.

“It shocked me,” says Olivier Nsengimana, a Rwandan veterinarian and conservationist who founded the Rwanda Wildlife Conservation Association (RWCA). He says a 2017 census counted fewer than 500 of the birds across the country. “We had more cranes in people’s homes than we had in the wild.”

Faced with habitat loss, capture for illegal trade as pets, and other threats, the gray crowned crane (Balearica regulorum) was quietly slipping toward local extirpation in Rwanda. A similar story was unfolding in neighboring countries, including Burundi and Uganda, and elsewhere in the cranes’ range, which extends across East and Southern Africa. In 2012, the cranes were assessed as endangered by the IUCN, the global wildlife conservation authority.

To protect cranes, protect wetlands

The survival of these birds rests on the preservation of wetlands. Across Africa, vast areas of wetlands are being lost, frequently drained and converted into farmland or to make way for peri-urban expansion. Nearly 50% of these ecologically vital landscapes were lost over the past 50 years.

“[Cranes] find food and breed in wetlands,” Nsengimana says. “In five decades, we have lost close to about 80% of cranes, and that is due to habitat loss.”

The U.N. Environment Programme estimates that Rwanda lost approximately 36% of its wetlands between 1998 and 2016. In neighboring Uganda, where the crane is the national bird, 30% of wetlands were lost between 1998 and 2008, before stabilizing.

“If you track the collapse of wetlands and then look at the decline in crane populations, they are proportional,” Achilles Byaruhanga, executive director of conservation NGO NatureUganda, tells Mongabay.

“If we don’t do much, put good conservation measures in place, the crane can disappear in the country in the next 25 years. That will be a big disaster and a big shame because it’s the symbol for the country,” he says.

Beyond wetland destruction, cranes have also been threatened by local and international trade. These beautiful birds are in demand as pets both in East Africa and in the Middle East.

Rwandan association leads the way

When he founded RWCA in 2015, Nsengimana took up the task of saving cranes as a priority. The association has been at the forefront of efforts that have rescued many gray crowned cranes from captivity in private homes and successfully reintroduced them to their natural habitats.

With the support of the government, it launched a national awareness campaign to inform the public about the plight of the cranes. But rather than criminalizing those who owned the birds, the campaign offered amnesty.

“We told them, ‘We love cranes. We know you love them. Let’s give them a second chance,’” Nsengimana tells Mongabay. “They accepted.”

Residents from across the country began calling Nsengimana’s team, inviting them into their homes to surrender the birds. Each crane was carefully registered and examined. Those in good health and with intact feathers were sent to a fenced rehabilitation area in Akagera National Park, where they were given supplemental food and the time needed to regrow feathers and relearn flight.

Once ready, they were released into the wild. Others — those too injured to survive on their own — were relocated to a specially restored wetland sanctuary, now known as Umusambi village, in the capital, Kigali.

These efforts have contributed to a significant rise in the crane population in Rwanda. “In 2017, [when] we started to count cranes in Rwanda, and at the very first census, we counted 487. Last year, we counted 1,293 cranes,” Nsengimana tells Mongabay by phone from his home in Kigali.

He says they’re now focusing on building community conservationists. More than 270 people now work with RWCA, 90% of them from local communities. They run activities in communities like school campaigns, use bicycles and soccer games to spread awareness, and support women-led initiatives to reduce reliance on wetlands.

“We are creating jobs in conservation,” Nsengimana says. “We want people to benefit and participate.”

Cranes without borders

Nsengimana says RWCA soon realized that cranes don’t recognize borders. Radio tags fitted on cranes in Rwanda revealed regular cross-border movements into Uganda, Burundi and Tanzania.

“They go and come back. Some stay there,” Nsengimana says. “That showed us we can’t do this alone.”

In response, RWCA began forming alliances with conservation groups across East Africa. In Tanzania and Uganda, community conservation champions — local residents trained and equipped with apps and smartphones — have been recruited to monitor cranes, report sightings and protect breeding sites. This will extend to Burundi soon.

Byaruhanga, whose NGO is a member of this alliance, says community involvement is vital. “The best approach is to work with local people: train them, raise awareness, and empower them to be stewards of the species.”

Uganda has drafted a national crane action plan. The government, Byaruhanga says, has gazetted all wetlands vital for the recovery of the crane population. “As conservationists, they have at the local level identified sites that are extremely important for crane conservation and highlighted them as Ramsar sites, wetlands of international importance. It’s in these wetlands where community guardians look over the cranes daily.”

These efforts are yielding positive results. Byaruhanga says the latest census data, from 2022, showed there’s no longer a decline — the population has stabilized.

Hope for the future

Byaruhanga cites multiple benefits of protecting cranes and their wetland habitats. In Uganda, for example, birdwatching is the second most important tourism activity, after gorilla trekking.

“We are promoting birds and birding as an important activity. We are earning from it, we must protect birds,” he says.

For Nsengimana, the ongoing regional initiatives give him hope. “In the next 10 years, I hope for positive news: the kind where cranes are not declining but increasing because of regional efforts. In Rwanda, we have achieved it, and I believe it can be achieved across the region.”

He adds, “I feel very good, it has been a privilege to work in Rwanda. I would not have been able to do it alone. It’s a credit to all Rwandans.”

For his efforts, Nsengimana has been awarded the 2025 Whitley Gold Award by the Whitley Fund for Nature, a U.K.-based charity. The award, which comes with 100,000 pounds ($133,000) in project funding, is given to a person who has made an outstanding contribution to conservation. It’s the second time Nsengimana has received the prize commonly dubbed the “Green Oscars”; he was a recipient in 2018, also for his work with the gray crowned crane.

Banner image: Olivier Nsengimana, founder of Rwanda Wildlife Conservation Association. Image courtesy of James Rooney/National Geographic Society.

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BiodiversityBirdsConservationDegraded LandsEndangered SpeciesEnvironmentEnvironmental PolicyGovernanceTropicsWaterWetlandsAfricaEast AfricaRwandaUganda

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