Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
Q I seem to remember that when I was a kid, I saw a TV special with a man doing a
dance with a Whooping Crane. Did that really happen or was it my imagination?
A
You're remembering a real bird and scientist whose wonderful interactions provided
a lot of information about how to successfully rear some “imprinted” Whooping Cranes
in captivity. Their bond actually led to a conservation triumph. The man was George
Archibald, founder of the International Crane Foundation, and the Whooping Crane was
Tex, a bird that had been hatched in the mid-1960s at the San Antonio Zoo and needed
special care. Because she was hand-fed, she had imprinted on humans. Before she was
oldenoughtobreed,shewassenttothePatuxentWildlifeCenterwheretheyworkedhard
trying to get her to accept another Whooping Crane as a mate. But she clearly preferred
her human handlers, never showed any interest in the other bird, and never laid an egg.
In 1975, Tex was moved to the International Crane Foundation in Wisconsin, under
Archibald's care, and the scientist began a long-term experiment to see if this imprinted
bird would form a pair bond with a human so she could be induced to ovulate and be ar-
tificially inseminated. He moved in with Tex for several months in 1976 and established
a pair bond with her, regularly dancing with her. He followed Tex's lead and flapped and
jumped. The next spring, she laid the first egg of her life, at age 10, but it was infertile.
They tried again the next spring and this time she produced a fertile egg, but the chick
died just before hatching. In 1979, Tex's egg was soft-shelled and broke. Finally, on May
3, 1981, Tex laid a fertile egg that hatched into a chick they named Gee Whiz. Tex was
killed by raccoons in 1982, but her genes live on: Gee Whiz has fathered many crane
chicks, some of which have been released into the wild in the Whooping Crane reintro-
duction project.
Parasitic Parenting and the Mysteries of Imprinting
Q Last summer I saw a Song Sparrow feeding its baby, only the chick was huge —
it looked twice as big as its parent! How common is it for birds to produce such a
gigantic baby?
A
What you saw wasn't a giant Song Sparrow — it was a Brown-headed Cowbird. The
cowbird female laid her egg in the sparrow nest, and the pair of Song Sparrows raised
