The whooping crane is roughly the fifth largest extant species of crane in the world, on average. Whooping cranes are the tallest bird native to North America and are anywhere from the third to the fifth heaviest species there, depending on which figures are used. The species can reportedly stand anywhere from in height. Wingspan, at least typically, is from . Widely reported averages put males at a mean mass of , while females weigh on average (Erickson, 1976). However, one small sample of unsexed whooping cranes weighed on average. Typical weights of adults seem to be between . The body length, from the tip of the bill to the end of the tail, averages about . The standard linear measurements of the whooping cranes are a wing chord length of , an exposed culmen length of and a tarsus of . The only other very large, long-legged white birds in North America are: the great egret, which is over a foot (30 cm) shorter and one-seventh the weight of this crane; the great white heron, which is a morph of the great blue heron in Florida; and the wood stork. All three other birds are at least 30% smaller than the whooping crane. Herons and storks are also quite different in structure from the crane. Larger individuals (especially males of the larger races) of sandhill crane can overlap in size with adult whooping cranes but are obviously distinct at once for their gray rather than white color.