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Article: Rare birds cared for by rarer people: Whooping cranes pampered, coaxed to breed near Laurel.
- Article from:
- The Baltimore Sun (Baltimore, MD)
- Article date:
- April 12, 2006
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2006 The Baltimore Sun. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Byline: Abigail Tucker
Apr. 12--Black sky. Blue lightning. White birds - white as the nearly two feet of snow that fell on the Patuxent Wildlife Research Center that night, the flakes as big as feathers. The worst part of the storm hit after sunset, a scene ripped from an ornithologist's nightmare. Layers of ice and snow settled on the mesh roofs of more than a hundred whooping crane pens, which, as hours passed, began to droop and tear.
Then, as though in answer to the eerie lightning, thunder: the sound of nets collapsing, one after another, and of tons of snow dumping on the heads of the rarest birds in the world. Many of the 5-foot-tall cranes ...