Every once in a while you find a human interest story that just kind of tugs at your heart strings.  Crane 710 is just that kind of story.

It started innocently enough.  In Spring Hill, local residents stocked bird feeders where the rare whooping crane decided to dine, instead of scavenging for food in the wild like all cranes are supposed to.  In early spring, he returned to Wisconsin and continued his human dependency for food.

He made continued visits to an ethanol plant located five miles from Necedah National Wildlife Refuge.  The plant received truckloads of corn daily.  Though wildlife officials attempted to discourage the crane, nothing worked.  The crazy crane began pecking on the front door demanding to be fed.

That was it.  Operation Migration, a first in its nine-year history, pulled the crane from the flock.  It became too tame to survive in the wild, so it was returned to Tampa’s Lowry Park Zoo to live as an educational exhibit.

The concern is that humans endangered an already endangered species.  The number of wild whooping cranes shrunk to a meager fifteen in the 1940s due to hunting and habitat loss.  There are currently only 314 wild whooping cranes in the U.S. and Canada.

When working with the propagation of whooping cranes, crane costumes are donned by caretakers who are careful to never personally interact with the birds.  Caretakers even use puppets to demonstrate to the birds how to eat and drink.  The objective is to not domesticate them at all, so that they may survive successfully in the wild.

It may not sound like a big deal to feed wild birds, but whooping cranes have a sharp beak and claws, and stand five feet tall.  They are, by far, the tallest birds in North America.  With these attributes, the birds could not only become a nuisance, but cause grave danger.  Once domesticated, it is often necessary to trap and kill them, since there is typically no place designed to retain them.

Though the intentions of the Spring Hill citizens were meant for good, it created a situation that cost manpower, time and money … and crane 710 his wings.

Who would have thought that feeding hungry birds would have turned into such a predicament?