122 On the trail of vanishing birds 



old, quite possibly if appearances meant anything much older. 

 There he had reigned in solitary splendor, for he never became 

 friendly with his human captors nor did he consort with the 

 lesser sandhill cranes or the ducks and geese within the same pen, 

 except to make occasional raids on the eggs of captive Canada 

 geese that nested in the area. Partly because of these raids, and 

 partly as a result of his aloof, one-eyed, male demeanor, he had 

 been known as "Old Devil." Later on, when we were momentarily 

 in doubt as to his sex, Bud Keefer renamed him "Petunia," with 

 the proviso that it would be shortened to "Pete" if he turned 

 out to be a male. So "Pete" he eventually became. 



The female bird had been in the New Orleans Zoo since late 

 in 1940, or something less than eight years when Pete arrived. As 

 we reconstructed her personal history, she was apparently one of 

 the small Louisiana resident flock that had lived in the marshes 

 near White Lake (theoretically, as a species, since the Pleisto- 

 cene!). In the late summer of 1940 heavy rains had flooded this 

 marsh and the 13 birds that comprised the whooping-crane popu- 

 lation had been forced to seek higher ground. When the waters 

 fell to their normal depths, only 6 cranes returned. This individual 

 had been wounded by a farmer in Evangeline Parish, far from their 

 usual haunts, and carried to the zoo where she was nursed back to 

 health. 



In discussing the subject with various people and looking into 

 the literature, I came across several interesting and even significant 

 stories about captive whooping cranes. One had been winged on 

 Grand Prairie, in Dunklin County, Missouri, many years ago (the 

 last Missouri record was for 1913, but this bird may have been 

 shot as early as 1860), and kept as a pet by a Dr. Cook of Cotton- 

 plant, and later by his widow, for a period of more than thirty 

 years. A juvenile female had died in the Frankfurt, Germany, 

 Zoological Gardens in 1871, an adult had died in the Jardin des 

 Plantes in Paris in 1872, another adult in the Philadelphia Zoo 

 about 1892, another in the Central Park Zoo in New York in 1898, 

 and so on through a long and somehow rather futile list. Many 

 years ago several captive whooping cranes were kept at the 

 Mexican Hacienda El Molino "as one of the attractions of the 



