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Cranes 385

Habituated cranes do not respond with appropriate caution or fear to humans, dogs, or situa-
tions to which they have been repeatedly exposed without consequence. Release of a habituated
bird may create a variety of problematic scenarios, none of which are healthy for the crane. There
are methods that can retrain a habituated crane and help incorporate it into the wild population.
Housing habituated cranes with normal cranes is very important to success. Restrict contact with
humans as soon as possible. Aversion techniques, such as noise-making, may encourage the habit-
uated bird to reconsider its level of comfort with things that will prove dangerous to it in the wild.
Consider a crane that has been reared in contact with a family dog. Although that dog may not
cause the crane harm, other dogs likely will once the bird has been released. The bird must have
the correct fear response to survive. Habituation can be reversed; imprinting cannot.
Cranes are curious by nature and both imprint and habituate easily to human caretakers. There are
several successful methods by which to raise wild crane colts without imprinting them to humans:
Pair each chick with a nonreleasable crane foster parent. This is the least labor-intensive and
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produces the best results if an appropriate adult is located. The limiting factor is that each adult
can generally rear only one colt at a time due to sibling rivalry when others are introduced. Adult
cranes may be aggressive to colts. If this is a problem with a bird that is available to use as a foster,
install a see-through wall or screening that will allow the adult to be in sight and hearing of the
colt. This way it can still serve as a role model.
Raise colts in visual and auditory contact with other cranes of the same species.
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Play audio recordings of wild cranes with young.
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Rear in a sheltered area with a taxidermized adult crane mounted in the head-down position if
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a live foster is not available.
As a last resort, if captive fostering is not an option, use costume rearing, with the human car-
egivers dressed as cranes or covered in material similar in color to the adult crane, and a puppet
that mimics the adult crane closely in size, shape, and coloration. Sounds are important to a young-
ster, so human voices must be kept to a minimum. Recordings of breeding cranes should be used.

­ Diet

While in captivity, a very young crane colt can be encouraged to eat from a bowl if a red item,
simulating the tip of the parent’s beak, is placed into the food dish. Care should be taken that the
simulated beak is sturdy and not an ingestion danger to the colt. The diet of cranes varies with
age. It is important to remember that while the adult diet includes vegetation and grain, the diet
of a young crane, for the first 45–60 days, consists almost entirely of killed insects, invertebrates,
and aquatic vertebrates.
Feeding live insects or animals to a very young crane is dangerous and not recommended.
Young birds do not have the experience, skill, or digestive enzymes to kill and digest live prey. The
parent kills all but the smallest insects for the first weeks of life and continues to kill larger prey
for several weeks.
Offer as much natural food, such as insects and aquatic invertebrates, as the colt will eat.
Fresh food should always be available. Cranes reared in captivity but destined to go back into
the wild need a natural diet. This is not only for nutritional support, but to develop their normal
intestinal flora and gain experience foraging as well. Cranes grow at a rapid rate and ingest
large amounts of food to provide the calories, minerals, and other nutrients to support their
metabolic needs.