Yesterday, I mentioned that the prehistoric trick to "domesticating" danger chickens (aka, Cassowaries, the world's most dangerous bird) was, apparently, to get them to imprint on their owners straight out of the egg.
Sounds simple, but love is a strange thing as the keepers at the Washington, D.C. National Zoo learned when they acquired a 23-year old adult White-napped Crane, hatched in Wisconsin and named Walnut, who had never mated.
Walnut not only rejected male crane suitors, she killed them -- a very bad turn of events for a bird under threat of extinction. The likely cause: she had imprinted on her human keepers in Wisconsin soon after being hatched.
The fix? Keeper Chris Crowe at the 3,200-acre Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute in the Shenandoah Valley slowly worked with the crane until it effectively accepted him as her suitor.
Crowe had to learn to flap his arms in an enticing manner, rest his hand on her back, and rhythmically rub her thighs in order to get her ready for artificial insemination.
That summer, however, Crowe noticed that Walnut seemed interested in, well, him. When Crowe stopped by her yard, she would bow her head and raise her wings — motions that Crowe now recognizes as the first moves of a mating dance. “At first, I thought that she was just excited to see me,” Crowe says. “But then I’d see the other pairs doing the same things, and it kind of dawned on me.” Crowe accepted Walnut’s invitation to dance. Though he felt a little silly, he bobbed his head when Walnut bobbed hers, and raised and lowered his arms like wings. The two circled each other, and sometimes Walnut would make a loud, trumpeting call — the beginning of the white-naped crane love duet. If no one was around, Crowe would try to do the male part of the song — making a Homer Simpson-like “woo-hoo”
As for Crowe, this is likely to be a long love story.
Captive cranes can live to age 60 and mate for life, so Crowe’s commitment could last decades. “If she’s still here when I’m eligible for retirement, I won’t be able to leave,” he says. “I’d feel like a jerk.”
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