Chinese red-crowned cranes’ flight for freedom runs out of steam
Birds, raised in zoo, suddenly took to the sky while performing for tourists, but didn’t get far because they’d lost their ability to fly in captivity
Thirteen red-crowned cranes escaped from a zoo in northeast China on Tuesday but most of them quickly abandoned the flight because of their lack of fitness after living in captivity, a local newspaper reports.
Wintesses at a residential compound in Shenyang, Liaoning province, where three of the escaped birds were found, said the big birds seemed to fall from the sky as if “physically spent”, according to the Shenyang Evening News.
Residents and security guards brought them fish, thinking they might have been exhausted through hunger.
But zoo staff who came to retrieve them after being notified said the cranes were all bred in a domestic environment where they had little use of their wings, and would have had little chance of survival on their own in the outside world.