A true lady

Lady, the bird, lives up to her name.

She ruled the roost at Craneville — the permanent home at Save Our Seabirds for sandhill cranes whose severe injuries prevent them from eventually returning to the wild.

She was the greeter at Craneville, which is visible to the public, and was the bird who often spread her wings as a welcoming gesture whenever a new bird arrived.

She was the protector, often stepping between two birds if they pecked at one another.

“There’s something about her,” said Yianna Hernandez, SOS animal and hospital caretaker. “She says, ‘Respect me.’”

But, although she can show her tough side with the bigger birds, the bottom line about Lady is this:
“She’s always a lady,” said Lee Fox, executive director of SOS.

Staff members at SOS describe Lady as quiet, gentile and docile. So, last spring, after more than a year in Craneville, Fox decided Lady was ready for a new role — one that would require her to not only be a lady, but a surrogate mother.

Typically, baby sandhill cranes remain with their parents for a year. From their parents, they learn important survival skills, including feeding. Lady’s job would be to fill that void for the baby birds. Other sandhill cranes would jab at the babies to get them out of their way.

On a Thursday in the spring, staff watched as Lady picked up food pellets and corn with her beak and dropped them next to two babies. They were too young to pick up the food. But she kept trying. Eventually, her maternal instincts kicked in, and she began picking up the pellets and depositing them directly into the beak of the youngest bird, which was just 4 weeks old. But being a mother to those two birds wasn’t enough for this Lady. She brought the pellets to the end of her wired cage and attempted to drop them inside the neighboring cage for those two birds as well.

“She’s a good mommy,” Hernandez said.

But, for all her ladylike qualities, there’s another trait that stands out about Lady:

“She’s a trooper,” said volunteer Karen Bennett.

Lady luck
On an early morning in the fall of 2009, Fox got a call at her Wimauma home about a severely injured bird on a Tampa golf course. Fox arrived and found an adult female sandhill crane that had been beaten with a golf club by a golfer who missed his shot after the bird stepped in front of him.

For Fox, who has done bird-rescue work since 1987, the bird’s injuries were among the worst she had ever seen. She thought the bird, which was unconscious and bloody, would die and rushed her to an emergency veterinary clinic; she thought the bird’s skull was crushed — an injury that would most likely result in euthanization. But at the clinic, X-rays showed that the bird’s skull was fractured, not crushed.

Fox took the bird back to SOS to make her comfortable. She and her staff tube-fed the bird and gave her antibiotics, injections and an anti-inflammatory medication. In two days, the bird woke up. And, quickly, she began to show her gentle disposition. She never fussed or squawked during treatment.

At SOS, staff doesn’t name the birds that will eventually go back to the wild. But this bird was so badly hurt that she would never again survive in the wild. Instead, she would join the ranks of birds such as Peeps, a sandhill crane who has a hole in her beak because of a sea-turtle bite, or Billis, a pelican whose bill was sliced off by an angry fisherman — birds who have both a name and permanent home at SOS.

Because of the bird’s personality, a name came to Fox right away: Lady.

Eventually, Lady showed progress. Staff massaged her legs, body and neck day after day and eventually got her walking just a few steps at a time. It took an entire month before Fox could get the dried blood out of her eye socket that was missing an eye. At night, when staff left the facility, they laid Lady down on the floor of the critical-care area. At first, her neck and head pointed straight down as the result of her injuries. But, day by day, her condition improved.

“After 30 days, she could hold her head up,” Fox said. “She had the will to live and the will to survive.”
By the end of 2009, she was out of the hospital and a resident of Craneville, where she flourished before taking on the role of mother hen.

Wings of wisdom
Lady remains in a pen that holds the babies with which she works, along with injured adult sandhill cranes. The area isn’t visible to the public, because some of the birds will eventually be released. It’s best for such birds to avoid becoming too familiar with people, according to Fox.

The baby birds that Lady mothers are learning to feed themselves. According to Fox, some could go to a transition area within a month, although they’ll need care until they’re 1 year old.

Unlike Lady, they don’t have names, because, eventually, they could make their way back into the wild.
According to Fox, Lady still seems to keep her watchful eye over the birds in her pen. But, every so often, Lady does something slightly out of character.

On a recent morning, she was spotted playfully pecking at one of her adult cage mates.

Like a true lady, she can let her feathers down — and have a little fun.

Contact Robin Hartill at [email protected].

Staying afloat
This unnamed sandhill crane, which is currently sharing a pen with Lady, uses children’s floating toys for therapy. According to Lee Fox, executive director of Save Our Seabirds, the toys are used for birds that will eventually be released into the wild because it provides support to birds that can’t walk on their own while forcing them to use their muscles to push forward with their feet, which prevents atrophy.