Bird Love Stories

I did some research on lone geese, and the wisdom of the internet seems to be that they are not usually social outcasts but mourning the loss of a mate. So that would explain why our neighborhood lone goose seems sad, but maybe I annoyed it by saying I would be its friend, because today I didn't see it. Geese mate for life, and if they lose their mate, they sometimes stay alone forever, but even if they do look for a new mate, it wouldn't be until the fall, when they all gather together to migrate. The other possibility is that it is a young goose that hasn't found a mate yet, but it seems very sad, so I think it is in mourning. No wonder it disappeared when I offered to be its friend - it doesn't want a friend, it just wants to be left alone to grieve.

I also looked up whether cranes can hybridize, and I found a fascinating story from five years ago, when a male whooping crane took up with a female sandhill crane at Horicon Marsh. They had a chick, and the Crane Foundation posted a photo of the white crane that was almost twice as tall as the brown crane, and the little chick walking between them. At that time the Crane Foundation wasn't too worried about "Whoopsie" the whoop hill crane, since crane chicks have high mortality rates. However, Whoopsie grew up, and then the Crane Foundation got kind of freaked out. Even though this happened in nature, they decided to interfere, so they caught Whoopsie and kept him at the Crane Foundation, paired up with a sandhill crane. Even though he is almost certainly sterile, they didn't want there to be any chance that he would dilute the whooping crane gene pool. Worse, they caught his dad and took him to a breeding facility in Florida to try to convince him to mate with another whooping crane. Can you imagine his poor first wife back in Horicon Marsh? She is probably thinking, "I found the tallest, most beautiful crane in the marsh, and now he has disappeared!" Hopefully she found another sandhill crane to mate with, but if cranes mate for life, I'm not sure either one will want a new mate after they chose each other. Kind of a tragic romance, all thanks to people. Maybe we shouldn't mess with nature.

Famous Hat