A New Life for Two Whooping Crane Chicks
By Mark Chenoweth of Whooper Happenings

On October 6, 2006, Bode (below) and Ohno were flown to the Jacksonville Zoo in Florida. They traveled from Wisconsin in special crates aboard a large airplane. Imagine all those strange sights and sounds! How do you think the birds felt?

Photo: Mark Chenoweth

Marianne says, “I didn’t think they would be too afraid, because we hadn’t done any fear training with them. After we knew they were going to a zoo instead of migrating, we were trying to figure out how to slowly get the chicks used to people.”

They let a vehicle approach the pen site where the two DAR chicks lived. They let the chicks hear people talking. They let them see people standing a short distance away. In this way, the birds got used to humans. Until then, the birds had never seen humans nor heard the human voice, as they were raised using a strict costume protocol. (Silence and hiding in costumes keeps captive-hatched Whooping Cranes from imprinting on their human caretakers.)