123 Rusty 



place." There is no record of their attempting to nest. The 

 Duchess of Bedford kept eleven species of cranes on her estate 

 in England (circa 1907), and four species nested successfully. 

 Among those that made no attempt to nest was the whooping 

 crane. Also in England, Lord Lilford had a captive female that 

 was purchased in 1892. She lived at Lilford Hall for forty years. 

 For a number of years she laid infertile eggs, sometimes sharing 

 the same nest with a female Manchurian crane, who was also an 

 egg-layer. Even after the whooper ceased to lay she guarded and 

 brooded the infertile clutch of the Manchurian female. 



In 1913, the Bronx Zoo had one captive whooping crane, and 

 the energetic Dr. Homaday advertised widely for a mate for this 

 bird, hoping that they might breed and thus help to save the 

 species from extinction. Nothing came of the project. The last 

 time I talked with the late Edward Avery Mcllhenny at Avery 

 Island, Louisiana, was in December, 1946. He told me that in 

 the early 1880s his father had taken him to prairies near Avery 

 Island to hunt prairie chickens. There were at that early date only 

 five houses in the hamlet on the Vermilion River now known as 

 Abbeville (now the principle town in a parish of over 40,000 

 people), and not a fence post had been set up from there to the 

 Sabine River, 100 miles to the west. Whooping cranes were still 

 relatively abundant, and they shot them on the prairies as well 

 as around Avery Island. As a boy he had kept several "wing- 

 tipped" whoopers, and they were great pets. However, they de- 

 veloped an unfortunate habit of catching his mother's young 

 chickens and eating them, so he had to get rid of them. Apparently 

 they never nested, or "Mr. Ned" would certainly have told me 

 about it. 



There are other records of captive whoopers, but the most 

 sympathetic story is that of S. W. Oliver, who kept one as a 

 boy in what is now Walworth County, South Dakota, but was a 

 part of Dakota Territory in the fall of 1885, when these events 

 took place. This is close to the Missouri River, and the whoopers 

 came through on migration in some numbers in those days. How- 

 ever, it was a rare occurrence for them to stop off, and when six 

 alighted in a nearby field Mr. Oliver and his brother stalked them 



