Nepal
Nepal, officially the Federal Democratic Republic of Nepal, is a landlocked central Himalayan country in South Asia. Nepal is divided into 7 provinces and 75 districts and 744 local units including 4 metropolises,13 sub-metropolises,246 municipal councils and 481 village and it has a population of 26.4 million and is the 93rd largest country by area. Bordering China in the north and India in the south, Nepal does not border Bangladesh, which is located within only 27 km of its southeastern tip. It neither borders Bhutan due to the Indian state of Sikkim being located in between, Nepal has a diverse geography, including fertile plains, subalpine forested hills, and eight of the worlds ten tallest mountains, including Mount Everest, the highest point on Earth. Kathmandu is the capital and largest city. It is a nation with Nepali as the official language. The territory of Nepal has a history since the Neolithic age. The name Nepal is first recorded in texts from the Vedic Age, the era which founded Hinduism, in the middle of the first millennium BCE, Gautama Buddha, the founder of Buddhism, was born in southern Nepal.
Parts of northern Nepal were intertwined with the culture of Tibet, the Kathmandu Valley in central Nepal became known as Nepal proper because of its complex urban civilization. It was the seat of the prosperous Newar confederacy known as Nepal Mandala, the Himalayan branch of the ancient Silk Road was dominated by the valleys traders. The cosmopolitan region developed distinct traditional art and architecture, by the 18th century, the Gorkha Kingdom achieved the unification of Nepal. The Shah dynasty established the Kingdom of Nepal and formed an alliance with the British Empire, the country was never colonized but served as a buffer state between Imperial China and Colonial India. In the 20th century, Nepal ended its isolation and forged ties with regional powers. Parliamentary democracy was introduced in 1951, but was suspended by Nepalese monarchs in 1960 and 2005. The Nepalese Civil War resulted in the proclamation of a republic in 2008, modern Nepal is a federal secular parliamentary republic.
Nepal is a nation, ranking 144th on the Human Development Index in 2016. The country struggles with the transition from a monarchy to a republic and it suffers from high levels of hunger and poverty. Despite these challenges, Nepal is making progress, with the government declaring its commitment to elevate the nation from least developed country status by 2022
Relief carving
Relief carving as a type of wood carving in which figures are carved in a flat panel of wood. The figures project only slightly from the rather than standing freely. Depending on the degree of projection, reliefs may be classified as high or medium relief, Relief carving can be described as carving pictures in wood. The process of carving involves removing wood from a flat wood panel in such a way that an object appears to rise out of the wood. Relief carving begins with an idea, usually put to paper in the form of a master pattern which is transferred to the wood surface. Most relief carving is done with hand tools - chisels and gouges - which often require a mallet to drive them through the wood, as wood is removed from the panel around the objects traced onto it from the pattern, the objects themselves stand up from the background wood. Modeling of the objects can take place as soon as enough background has been removed, in order to secure the wood panel, a workbench with fixtures like bench-dogs, carvers screw or clamps, is necessary.
Carving tools come in a variety of shapes and sizes, some aimed strictly at the hobbyist. Some carving tools are held one hand while the carving is held in the other. But most relief carving requires that the wood panel be secured so that both hands may be on the carving tool, much of the skill required for relief carving lies in learning to grip and manipulate tools to get the desired effect. Tool sharpening is a skill to learn, and dull tools are a severe obstacle to effective carving. Create a pattern, drawn on paper, prepare a wood panel for carving. This may be a piece of wood or a laminated panel. Transfer the pattern to the panel, using paper as the transfer medium. Remove wood around the objects that comprise the pattern, model the objects Detail the objects Tidy the background behind the objects Apply a suitable finish to the panel 1. High relief, usually between 1/2 and 2 in depth, bas relief, or Low relief usually under 1/2 in depth. Deep relief, usually over 2 in depth, pierced relief, where holes are carved clear through the wood.
Some carvers prefer to finish their carving with a clear finish, but others incorporate color and pyrography into their relief carvings
Bronze
These additions produce a range of alloys that may be harder than copper alone, or have other useful properties, such as stiffness, ductility, or machinability. The archeological period where bronze was the hardest metal in use is known as the Bronze Age. In the ancient Near East this began with the rise of Sumer in the 4th millennium BC, with India and China starting to use bronze around the same time, everywhere it gradually spread across regions. The Bronze Age was followed by the Iron Age starting from about 1300 BC and reaching most of Eurasia by about 500 BC, the discovery of bronze enabled people to create metal objects which were harder and more durable than previously possible. Bronze tools, weapons and building such as decorative tiles were harder and more durable than their stone. It was only that tin was used, becoming the major ingredient of bronze in the late 3rd millennium BC. Tin bronze was superior to arsenic bronze in that the process could be more easily controlled. Also, unlike arsenic, metallic tin and fumes from tin refining are not toxic, the earliest tin-alloy bronze dates to 4500 BCE in a Vinča culture site in Pločnik.
Other early examples date to the late 4th millennium BC in Africa and some ancient sites in China, ores of copper and the far rarer tin are not often found together, so serious bronze work has always involved trade. Tin sources and trade in ancient times had a influence on the development of cultures. In Europe, a source of tin was the British deposits of ore in Cornwall. In many parts of the world, large hoards of bronze artefacts are found, suggesting that bronze represented a store of value, in Europe, large hoards of bronze tools, typically socketed axes, are found, which mostly show no signs of wear. With Chinese ritual bronzes, which are documented in the inscriptions they carry and from other sources and these were made in enormous quantities for elite burials, and used by the living for ritual offerings. Pure iron is soft, and the process of beating and folding sponge iron to wrought iron removes from the metal carbon. Careful control of the alloying and tempering eventually allowed for wrought iron with properties comparable to modern steel, Bronze was still used during the Iron Age, and has continued in use for many purposes to the modern day.
Among other advantages, it does not rust, the weaker wrought iron was found to be sufficiently strong for many uses. Archaeologists suspect that a disruption of the tin trade precipitated the transition. The population migrations around 1200–1100 BC reduced the shipping of tin around the Mediterranean, limiting supplies, there are many different bronze alloys, but typically modern bronze is 88% copper and 12% tin
Germany
Germany, officially the Federal Republic of Germany, is a federal parliamentary republic in central-western Europe. It includes 16 constituent states, covers an area of 357,021 square kilometres, with about 82 million inhabitants, Germany is the most populous member state of the European Union. After the United States, it is the second most popular destination in the world. Germanys capital and largest metropolis is Berlin, while its largest conurbation is the Ruhr, other major cities include Hamburg, Cologne, Stuttgart, Düsseldorf and Leipzig. Various Germanic tribes have inhabited the northern parts of modern Germany since classical antiquity, a region named Germania was documented before 100 AD. During the Migration Period the Germanic tribes expanded southward, beginning in the 10th century, German territories formed a central part of the Holy Roman Empire. During the 16th century, northern German regions became the centre of the Protestant Reformation, in 1871, Germany became a nation state when most of the German states unified into the Prussian-dominated German Empire.
After World War I and the German Revolution of 1918–1919, the Empire was replaced by the parliamentary Weimar Republic, the establishment of the national socialist dictatorship in 1933 led to World War II and the Holocaust. After a period of Allied occupation, two German states were founded, the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic, in 1990, the country was reunified. In the 21st century, Germany is a power and has the worlds fourth-largest economy by nominal GDP. As a global leader in industrial and technological sectors, it is both the worlds third-largest exporter and importer of goods. Germany is a country with a very high standard of living sustained by a skilled. It upholds a social security and universal health system, environmental protection. Germany was a member of the European Economic Community in 1957. It is part of the Schengen Area, and became a co-founder of the Eurozone in 1999, Germany is a member of the United Nations, NATO, the G8, the G20, and the OECD.
The national military expenditure is the 9th highest in the world, the English word Germany derives from the Latin Germania, which came into use after Julius Caesar adopted it for the peoples east of the Rhine. This in turn descends from Proto-Germanic *þiudiskaz popular, derived from *þeudō, descended from Proto-Indo-European *tewtéh₂- people, the discovery of the Mauer 1 mandible shows that ancient humans were present in Germany at least 600,000 years ago. The oldest complete hunting weapons found anywhere in the world were discovered in a mine in Schöningen where three 380, 000-year-old wooden javelins were unearthed
Sculpture
Sculpture is the branch of the visual arts that operates in three dimensions. It is one of the plastic arts, a wide variety of materials may be worked by removal such as carving, assembled by welding or modelling, or molded, or cast. However, most ancient sculpture was painted, and this has been lost. Those cultures whose sculptures have survived in quantities include the cultures of the ancient Mediterranean and China, the Western tradition of sculpture began in ancient Greece, and Greece is widely seen as producing great masterpieces in the classical period. During the Middle Ages, Gothic sculpture represented the agonies and passions of the Christian faith, the revival of classical models in the Renaissance produced famous sculptures such as Michelangelos David. Relief is often classified by the degree of projection from the wall into low or bas-relief, high relief, sunk-relief is a technique restricted to ancient Egypt. Relief sculpture may decorate steles, upright slabs, usually of stone, techniques such as casting and moulding use an intermediate matrix containing the design to produce the work, many of these allow the production of several copies.
The term sculpture is used mainly to describe large works. The very large or colossal statue has had an enduring appeal since antiquity, another grand form of portrait sculpture is the equestrian statue of a rider on horse, which has become rare in recent decades. The smallest forms of life-size portrait sculpture are the head, showing just that, or the bust, small forms of sculpture include the figurine, normally a statue that is no more than 18 inches tall, and for reliefs the plaquette, medal or coin. Sculpture is an important form of public art, a collection of sculpture in a garden setting can be called a sculpture garden. One of the most common purposes of sculpture is in form of association with religion. Cult images are common in cultures, though they are often not the colossal statues of deities which characterized ancient Greek art. The actual cult images in the innermost sanctuaries of Egyptian temples, of which none have survived, were rather small. The same is true in Hinduism, where the very simple.
Some undoubtedly advanced cultures, such as the Indus Valley civilization, appear to have had no monumental sculpture at all, though producing very sophisticated figurines, the Mississippian culture seems to have been progressing towards its use, with small stone figures, when it collapsed. Other cultures, such as ancient Egypt and the Easter Island culture, from the 20th century the relatively restricted range of subjects found in large sculpture expanded greatly, with abstract subjects and the use or representation of any type of subject now common. Today much sculpture is made for intermittent display in galleries and museums, small sculpted fittings for furniture and other objects go well back into antiquity, as in the Nimrud ivories, Begram ivories and finds from the tomb of Tutankhamun
Bavaria
Bavaria is a free state and one of 16 federal states of Germany. Located in the German southeast with an area of 70,548 square kilometres and its territory comprises roughly a fifth of the total land area of Germany, with 12.9 million inhabitants, it is Germanys second most populous state. Munich, Bavarias capital and largest city, is the third largest city in Germany, the Duchy of Bavaria dates back to the year 555. In the 17th century CE, the Duke of Bavaria became a Prince-elector of the Holy Roman Empire, the Kingdom of Bavaria existed from 1806 to 1918, when Bavaria became a republic. In 1946, the Free State of Bavaria re-organised itself on democratic lines after the Second World War, Bavaria has a unique culture, largely because of the states Catholic majority and conservative traditions. Bavarians have traditionally been proud of their culture, which includes such as Oktoberfest. The state has the second largest economy among the German states by GDP figures, modern Bavaria includes parts of the historical regions of Franconia, Upper Palatinate and Swabia.
The Bavarians emerged in a north of the Alps, previously inhabited by Celts. The Bavarians spoke Old High German but, unlike other Germanic groups, they seem to have coalesced out of other groups left behind by Roman withdrawal late in the 5th century. These peoples may have included the Celtic Boii, some remaining Romans, Allemanni, Thuringians, Scirians, the name Bavarian means Men of Baia which may indicate Bohemia, the homeland of the Celtic Boii and of the Marcomanni. They first appear in written sources circa 520, a 17th century Jewish chronicler David Solomon Ganz, citing Cyriacus Spangenberg, claimed that the diocese was named after an ancient Bohemian king, Boiia, in the 14th century BCE. From about 554 to 788, the house of Agilolfing ruled the Duchy of Bavaria and their daughter, became Queen of the Lombards in northern Italy and Garibald was forced to flee to her when he fell out with his Frankish overlords. Garibalds successor, Tassilo I, tried unsuccessfully to hold the frontier against the expansion of Slavs.
Tassilos son Garibald II seems to have achieved a balance of power between 610 and 616, after Garibald II little is known of the Bavarians until Duke Theodo I, whose reign may have begun as early as 680. From 696 onwards he invited churchmen from the west to organize churches and his son, led a decisive Bavarian campaign to intervene in a succession dispute in the Lombard Kingdom in 714, and married his sister Guntrud to the Lombard King Liutprand. At Theodos death the duchy was divided among his sons, at Hugberts death the duchy passed to a distant relative named Odilo, from neighbouring Alemannia. He was defeated near Augsburg in 743 but continued to rule until his death in 748, saint Boniface completed the peoples conversion to Christianity in the early 8th century. Bavaria was in ways affected by the Protestant Reformation in the 16th century
Oak
An oak is a tree or shrub in the genus Quercus of the beech family, Fagaceae. There are approximately 600 extant species of oaks, the common name oak appears in the names of species in related genera, notably Lithocarpus, as well as in those of unrelated species such as Grevillea robusta and the Casuarinaceae. North America contains the largest number of oak species, with approximately 90 occurring in the United States, the second greatest center of oak diversity is China, which contains approximately 100 species. Oaks have spirally arranged leaves, with lobate margins in many species, the acorns contain tannic acid, as do the leaves, which helps to guard from fungi and insects. Many deciduous species are marcescent, not dropping dead leaves until spring, in spring, a single oak tree produces both male flowers and small female flowers. The fruit is a nut called an acorn, borne in a structure known as a cupule, each acorn contains one seed and takes 6–18 months to mature. The live oaks are distinguished for being evergreen, but are not actually a distinct group, the oak tree is a flowering plant.
Oaks may be divided into two genera and a number of sections, The genus Quercus is divided into the following sections, the white oaks of Europe and North America. Styles are short, acorns mature in 6 months and taste sweet or slightly bitter, the leaves mostly lack a bristle on their lobe tips, which are usually rounded. The type species is Quercus robur, Hungarian oak and its relatives of Europe and Asia. Styles long, acorns mature in about 6 months and taste bitter, the section Mesobalanus is closely related to section Quercus and sometimes included in it. Cerris, the Turkey oak and its relatives of Europe and Asia, styles long, acorn mature in 18 months and taste very bitter. The inside of the shell is hairless. Its leaves typically have sharp tips, with bristles at the lobe tip. Protobalanus, the live oak and its relatives, in southwest United States. Styles short, acorns mature in 18 months and taste very bitter, the inside of the acorn shell appears woolly. Leaves typically have sharp tips, with bristles at the lobe tip.
Lobatae, the red oaks of North America, Central America, styles long, acorns mature in 18 months and taste very bitter
Middle Ages
In the history of Europe, the Middle Ages or Medieval Period lasted from the 5th to the 15th century. It began with the fall of the Western Roman Empire and merged into the Renaissance, the Middle Ages is the middle period of the three traditional divisions of Western history, classical antiquity, the medieval period, and the modern period. The medieval period is subdivided into the Early, High. Population decline, counterurbanisation and movement of peoples, the large-scale movements of the Migration Period, including various Germanic peoples, formed new kingdoms in what remained of the Western Roman Empire. In the seventh century, North Africa and the Middle East—once part of the Byzantine Empire—came under the rule of the Umayyad Caliphate, although there were substantial changes in society and political structures, the break with classical antiquity was not complete. The still-sizeable Byzantine Empire survived in the east and remained a major power, the empires law code, the Corpus Juris Civilis or Code of Justinian, was rediscovered in Northern Italy in 1070 and became widely admired in the Middle Ages.
In the West, most kingdoms incorporated the few extant Roman institutions, monasteries were founded as campaigns to Christianise pagan Europe continued. The Franks, under the Carolingian dynasty, briefly established the Carolingian Empire during the 8th, the Crusades, first preached in 1095, were military attempts by Western European Christians to regain control of the Holy Land from Muslims. Kings became the heads of centralised nation states, reducing crime and violence, intellectual life was marked by scholasticism, a philosophy that emphasised joining faith to reason, and by the founding of universities. Controversy and the Western Schism within the Catholic Church paralleled the conflict, civil strife. Cultural and technological developments transformed European society, concluding the Late Middle Ages, the Middle Ages is one of the three major periods in the most enduring scheme for analysing European history, classical civilisation, or Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the Modern Period.
Medieval writers divided history into periods such as the Six Ages or the Four Empires, when referring to their own times, they spoke of them as being modern. In the 1330s, the humanist and poet Petrarch referred to pre-Christian times as antiqua, leonardo Bruni was the first historian to use tripartite periodisation in his History of the Florentine People. Bruni and argued that Italy had recovered since Petrarchs time. The Middle Ages first appears in Latin in 1469 as media tempestas or middle season, in early usage, there were many variants, including medium aevum, or middle age, first recorded in 1604, and media saecula, or middle ages, first recorded in 1625. The alternative term medieval derives from medium aevum, tripartite periodisation became standard after the German 17th-century historian Christoph Cellarius divided history into three periods, Ancient and Modern. The most commonly given starting point for the Middle Ages is 476, for Europe as a whole,1500 is often considered to be the end of the Middle Ages, but there is no universally agreed upon end date.
English historians often use the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485 to mark the end of the period
Totem pole
Totem poles are monumental sculptures, a type of Northwest Coast art, consisting of poles, posts or pillars, carved with symbols or figures. They are usually made from trees, mostly western red cedar. The word totem derives from the Algonquian word odoodem, his kinship group, the carvings may symbolize or commemorate cultural beliefs that recount familiar legends, clan lineages, or notable events. The poles may serve as architectural features, welcome signs for village visitors, mortuary vessels for the remains of deceased ancestors. Given the complexity and symbolic meanings of totem pole carvings, their placement and importance lies in the observers knowledge, Totem pole carvings were likely preceded by a long history of decorative carving, with stylistic features borrowed from smaller prototypes. Renewed interest from tourists and scholars in the 1880s and 1890s helped document and collect the remaining totem poles, twentieth-century revivals of the craft, additional research, and continued support from the public have helped establish new interest in this regional artistic tradition.
Totem poles primarily serve as symbol to the animistic peoples of western North America reflecting their submission to a pantheon. Makers of these include the Haida, Tsimshian, Kwakwaka’wakw, Nuxalk. Totem poles are carved from the highly rot-resistant trunks of Thuja plicata trees. Because of the climate and the nature of the materials used to make the poles. Noteworthy examples, some dating as far back as 1880, include those at the Royal British Columbia Museum in Victoria and the Museum of Anthropology at UBC in Vancouver. Totem poles are the largest, but not the objects that coastal Pacific Northwest natives use to depict worship, family legends, people. The freestanding poles seen by the regions first European explorers were likely preceded by a history of decorative carving. Stylistic features of these poles were borrowed from smaller prototypes, or from the support posts of house beams. Before iron and steel arrived in the area, natives used crude tools made of stone, the process was slow and laborious, axes were unknown.
By the late century, the use of metal cutting tools enabled more complex carvings. The tall monumental poles appearing in front of homes in coastal villages probably did not appear until after the beginning of the nineteenth century. The scholar Eddie Malin has proposed that totem poles progressed from house posts, funerary containers, malins theory is supported by the photographic documentation of the Pacific Northwest coasts cultural history and the more sophisticated designs of the Haida poles
France
France, officially the French Republic, is a country with territory in western Europe and several overseas regions and territories. The European, or metropolitan, area of France extends from the Mediterranean Sea to the English Channel and the North Sea, Overseas France include French Guiana on the South American continent and several island territories in the Atlantic and Indian oceans. France spans 643,801 square kilometres and had a population of almost 67 million people as of January 2017. It is a unitary republic with the capital in Paris. Other major urban centres include Marseille, Lille, Toulouse, during the Iron Age, what is now metropolitan France was inhabited by the Gauls, a Celtic people. The area was annexed in 51 BC by Rome, which held Gaul until 486, France emerged as a major European power in the Late Middle Ages, with its victory in the Hundred Years War strengthening state-building and political centralisation. During the Renaissance, French culture flourished and a colonial empire was established.
The 16th century was dominated by civil wars between Catholics and Protestants. France became Europes dominant cultural and military power under Louis XIV, in the 19th century Napoleon took power and established the First French Empire, whose subsequent Napoleonic Wars shaped the course of continental Europe. Following the collapse of the Empire, France endured a succession of governments culminating with the establishment of the French Third Republic in 1870. Following liberation in 1944, a Fourth Republic was established and dissolved in the course of the Algerian War, the Fifth Republic, led by Charles de Gaulle, was formed in 1958 and remains to this day. Algeria and nearly all the colonies became independent in the 1960s with minimal controversy and typically retained close economic. France has long been a centre of art, science. It hosts Europes fourth-largest number of cultural UNESCO World Heritage Sites and receives around 83 million foreign tourists annually, France is a developed country with the worlds sixth-largest economy by nominal GDP and ninth-largest by purchasing power parity.
In terms of household wealth, it ranks fourth in the world. France performs well in international rankings of education, health care, life expectancy, France remains a great power in the world, being one of the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council with the power to veto and an official nuclear-weapon state. It is a member state of the European Union and the Eurozone. It is a member of the Group of 7, North Atlantic Treaty Organization, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the World Trade Organization, originally applied to the whole Frankish Empire, the name France comes from the Latin Francia, or country of the Franks
Router (woodworking)
A router is a tool used to rout out an area in the face of a relatively hard workpiece, typically of wood or plastic. The main application of routers is in woodworking, especially cabinetry, the router is most commonly used as a plunging tool and inverted in a router table. The hand tool form of router is the original form and it is a specialized type of hand plane with a broad base and a narrow blade projecting well beyond its base plate. Today the power tool form of router, with a spindle, is the more common form. Although the hand tool has a few advantages over the tool and retains favour with some workers, it has been mostly replaced by the modern spindle router. Some workers consider it to be the single most versatile woodworking power tool, becoming more popular is the use of a CNC wood router, which implements the advantages of CNC. Related to the router is a smaller, lighter version designed specifically for trimming laminates and it can be used for smaller general routing work. For example, with an appropriate jig it can be used for recessing door hinges, even rotary tools can be used as routers when the right bits and accessories are attached.
Before power routers existed, the hand tool form was used, especially by patternmakers. The first handheld power routers were invented in 1915 and were Jet Motor Hand Routers, the name derives from a combination of the inventors last name Onsrud and the term router. The Onsruter married a router plane with an endmill to create the first handheld power router, the idea for the Onsruter started when a rail road company decided they wanted to power the front light on a Steam Locomotive using exhaust steam from the engine. Oscar Onsrud and his son Rudy came up with, and submitted, a few months Rudy was talking with a friend about his frustrations making the groove in the bottom of a cane bottom chair using a router plane. The modified endmills would have to spin at 30,000 RPM, instead of the 3,000 RPM of a machine, in order to cut wood. These bits needed a steeper rake and clearance angle to evacuate the chips than needed on a traditional endmill and these new bits became known as router bits or router cutters.
Further refinement produced the plunge router, invented by ELU in Germany around 1949 and this is even better adapted for many types of work. Starting in the 1960s, the power tool form of router became the common form. Modern routers are used in place of traditional moulding planes or spindle moulder machines for edge decoration of timber. Routing is a high speed process of cutting and shaping wood, plastic, routing is properly applied to relatively weak and brittle materials, typically wood
Crane (bird)
Cranes are a family, Gruidae, of large, long-legged and long-necked birds in the group Gruiformes. There are fifteen species of crane in four genera, unlike the similar-looking but unrelated herons, cranes fly with necks outstretched, not pulled back. Cranes live on all continents except Antarctica and South America and they are opportunistic feeders that change their diet according to the season and their own nutrient requirements. They eat a range of items from suitably sized small rodents, fish and insects to grain, Cranes construct platform nests in shallow water, and typically lay two eggs at a time. Both parents help to rear the young, which remain with them until the breeding season. Some species and populations of cranes migrate over long distances, others do not migrate at all, Cranes are solitary during the breeding season, occurring in pairs, but during the non-breeding season they are gregarious, forming large flocks where their numbers are sufficient. Most species of cranes have been affected by human activities and are at the least classified as threatened, the plight of the whooping cranes of North America inspired some of the first US legislation to protect endangered species.
The cranes are large to large birds, including the worlds tallest flying bird. They are long-legged and long-necked birds with streamlined bodies and large rounded wings, the males and females do not vary in external appearance, but on average males tend to be slightly larger than females. The plumage of the cranes varies by habitat, species inhabiting vast open wetlands tend to have more white in the plumage than do species that inhabit smaller wetlands or forested habitats, which tend to be more grey. These white species are generally larger. Most species of crane have some areas of skin on the face. This skin is used in communication with other cranes, and can be expanded by contracting and relaxing muscles, feathers on the head can be moved and erected in the blue and demoiselle cranes for signalling as well. Also important to communication is the position and length of the trachea, in the two crowned-cranes the trachea is shorter and only slightly impressed upon the bone of the sternum, whereas the trachea of the other species is longer and penetrates the sternum.
In some species the entire sternum is fused to the plates of the trachea. The cranes have a distribution, occurring across most of the world continents. They are absent from Antarctica and, South America, east Asia is the centre of crane diversity, with eight species, followed by Africa, which holds five resident species and wintering populations of a sixth. Australia and North America have two species, the remaining genus, contains the most species and is the most widespread genus, although only a single species occurs in Africa as a wintering migrant
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