Abstract: A survey was carried out on population size of captive red-crowned cranes in 141 zoos (including urban zoos,park zoos,and wildlife parks) in China, through telephone consultation, field investigation and web searching. It was found that 83 of the 141 zoos had red-crowned cranes in captivity, with a total number of 917, of which 319 were in urban zoos, 82 in park zoos and 516 in wildlife parks. Differences between regines and between zoos (parks) were quite obvious in distribution of captive red-crowned cranes. One-way ANOVA shows that wildlife parks had more captive red-crowned cranes than park zoos did, but the differences were not so significant between urban zoos and wildlife parks/park zoos. The top three provinces in number of captive Red-crowned Cranes were Liaoning, Guangdong, and Heilongjiang, and the top ten provincial level administrative regions had a total of 719 captive red-crowned cranes, accounted for 78.4% of the total number in China. The top three regions in number of captive red-crowned cranes were Northeast China, East China, and North China, and had captive red-crowned cranes accounting for 74.3% of the total number in China.

Key words: cranes, Population, captive feeding, in-situ conservation, ex-situ conservation