FreeMe Wildlife worker Siya mimics an adult wattled crane to train a youngster.
When a baby animal is abandoned or orphaned in the wild, chances are good it's not going to survive without some kind of outside assistance. That's where wildlife rescues and rehabilitation centers come in to provide the safety and care a wee one needs to no only survive but learn to thrive.
That learning doesn't always come naturally, though. We might assume that animal instincts are enough for wildlife to know how to do basic survival tasks, but often they're not. Babies learn from their mothers how to eat and drink and other things they need to know how to do stay alive, and when the mom isn't there, humans have to fill in.
However, humans filling the mom role is problematic in its own right. Baby wildlife can imprint on human caregivers, seeing them as their mothers, which can interfere with their instincts and be dangerous for the animal. Ideally, helpful humans find ways to demonstrate necessary behaviors without creating too much of an attachment so that the animal can eventually thrive in the wild or at least with its own kind.
That's the idea behind a clever costume a worker at FreeMe Wildlife Midlands Centre in South Africa wore to teach a wattled crane chick how to drink from a pond. Watch:
The critically endangered crane chick was 2 1/2 months old and had been found with a broken leg. The costume appears to mimic an adult crane as the worker uses a puppet head and neck on its arm to "drink" from the pond when the chick is looking.
FreeMe shared that the puppet, Waldo, is "an all important tool in the rehabilitation, hand raising, and keeping wild of Wattled Crane chicks." Two workers at the center have mastered the art of mimicking an adult wattled crane's behavior. "This is a vital part of the rehabilitation process. If one does not intimately understand the physiology, the ethology, and the psychology of one's subject, one cannot successfully rehabilitate it..." FreeMe shared.
People might wonder why they don't just put another bird in the enclosure to teach it, but introducing animals to one another isn't always that simple, especially in captivity. Lots of people expressed their desire to do this job and some also shared other experiences with teaching birds how to be birds.
"Amazing! When I've rescued baby pigeons often they won't peck seeds unless there are other birds around, soo sometimes I'll put on a YouTube video of birds eating and then they get it."
"i hatch chickens and they do this too!! they don't come out of the egg knowing how to eat and drink, but they don't need to eat for the first 24-36 hours (they stay in the incubator to dry out). the first bunch will be able to teach the others, but those first hatched need to be taught. you do that by 'pecking' the food and water with your finger, they typically catch on in seconds and then don't need to be taught again."
Walking Chicken GIFGiphy
"This is exactly how the San Diego Zoo (amongst others) takes care of baby California condors so they don't imprint. Since they were so critically endangered and almost extinct in the wild, they used puppets to teach them how to be birds so they could be released and rebound their populations. And they were incredibly successful!"
As we saw recently with a man incubating an abandoned duck egg and raising the duckling for rehab, it's important for vulnerable wildlife to have humans who understand how to help them without making them dependent. The goal of a wildlife rescue should be to help an animal thrive in its natural habitat if at all possible, and if not, to at least make sure it knows how do the things others in its species can do. There are rare exceptions, of course, when a rescue animal is disabled or has a history that makes it human dependent, but as the FreeMe website states, the purpose a rehabilitation center is "to rehabilitate these animals so that they may be released back into the wild in areas free from poaching and with reduced human activity."
And sometimes it takes creative tools like a silly-looking costume to achieve that goal.