On Sunday, May 8, Marc Monaghan was in Washington Park looking for dog walkers to photograph. As he wandered past Lorado Taft’s Fountain of Time he saw a big white bird with a long beak and a flash of red on its forehead standing in the lagoon.
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Whooping cranes are notoriously shy, but this one seemed less perturbed by Monaghan than by a Canada goose that evidently thought it owned the lagoon–it kept hissing at the crane. Then a fight broke out between two men in the street next to the lagoon. “It was some stupid guy-car thing,” Monaghan says. “They had to be separated, then the guys got back in their cars.” But now he was worried that the bird was going to get hurt.
He went home and called the neighborhood birding expert but got no answer. He tried the police. “They got interested,” he says. “Finally they got me the number for the first-aid station at the Lincoln Park Zoo. That’s when I gave up.”
ICF staff could tell from Monaghan’s photos that the bird he’d found was number 18-04, a male raised the previous summer at the Necedah National Wildlife Refuge in central Wisconsin. The nearly 50 birds in the eastern flock are all hatched from eggs taken from the western flock. The chicks have as little contact with people as possible–the scientists who approach them wear white crane costumes and feed them using hand puppets that look like cranes. The fledglings are also raised separate from the older birds, then led south in the fall by an ultralight to teach them the migration route. According to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the whole process costs around $160,000 per bird.
On Monday evening, the day after Monaghan first saw 18-04, Westcott e-mailed ICF that the bird was still in the lagoon near 60th and Cottage Grove and that it “looked to be healthy but apprehensive of the observer.” It was still there the following morning. “While two observers were watching the crane they spotted a King Rail walking along the shoreline,” Westcott e-mailed ICF. “This is a seldom seen bird in these parts. We decided not to post the rail sighting on the internet, as it might bring out some birders who would most likely see the whooper and set off a mad rush.” He said other birders had seen the rail and posted an announcement online a little later, but they didn’t seem to have spotted the far larger crane.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photos/Marc Monaghan, Lloyd DeGrane.
