The crane couple returned last spring and soon had a colt (chick) trailing clumsily after them, flexing its featherless wings in imitation of Dad, accepting gullets full of food from Mom ... in my yard. It was our colt, I realized from talking to neighbors, the first one to hatch in three years. Loose dogs had kept them from nesting, I was told.
Four weeks into its life, we saw the colt floundering in a field, the parents defending it from dogs (and us) until Charlotte Adamson came and rescued it. Its leg was broken and the bone protruded through the skin. She took it to our local vet, Ralph Broshes, who amputated. The sanctuary in Oregon would not receive more injured cranes, so we tried to introduce it back to the parents. There are one-legged birds in the wild, we figured, knowing the odds were awful. On my watch, the parents passed it by for the last time. The baby died while I was holding it to feed it.
My feeling was more than sadness, it was a sense of having betrayed the cranes' trust. Millions of years of survival to their credit and now they just have to survive us. We are in their habitat and can choose to ignore their needs or live alongside them carefully.
People say there used to be hundreds of cranes in their field, on this bluff, that hill. "For some reason they're gone," I hear. In fact, Fish and Wildlife has no funding to keep track of the cranes in Homer. No one knows how they are faring, whether their numbers are sustained under pressure from hunting and predators, especially from our over-abundance of eagles. But if you ask people like Charlotte, the calls steadily come in about colts mangled by dogs.
About the second love story ... it's the one owned by Alaskans who grew up alongside the bear and moose, and, as one friend put it, "competed for the same food and space to survive." They know wildness more along the lines of Daniel Boone: "It was my job growing up to check the property for bears."
I can only guess at how much they enjoy their native state. A place like this guides you back to your own wildness as a human animal, tests your resourcefulness in an unforgiving environment. How deep their love must be.
How do I ask such a person to keep their pets from running free when the cranes are nesting nearby? And how do we as a community educate new residents about containing their pets? This is the last place, I want to tell them, our last chance to be surrounded by heavenly creatures. (Cranes are known as "The Birds of Heaven," Matthieson.) Ours are the last fish you can eat without ingesting mercury or PCBs, the last streams with bank- to-bank salmon.
The Northwest United States is wild and beautiful also, but the rivers and the fish are contaminated; the salmon are barely making it.
I want to say, perhaps as one would in a lover's quarrel, that dogs can do without chasing wildlife. It's against the law, but realistically it's up to us to keep them from doing so. Wild is great, freedom is what we want for our animals, but we are making a choice. People who have grown up in such bounty, and visitors who see it for the first time, may think it will last forever. I hear this Dylan song in my head; it's a plaintiff tune that matches what I'm feeling:
Once I had mountains in the palm of my hand,
Rivers I'd run through every day,
I must have been mad, I never knew what I had,
Until I threw it all away.
This year, in my neighborhood, I hope we're going to do better by the cranes.
Margaret O'Connor moved to Homer in July 2001 and has worked here as a psychologist since then.
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