Shanti and the Whooping Cranes

From our first day together I’ve been able to caress Shanti. He’s an affectionate bird. Often before he goes to sleep at night, he likes to cuddle up.

The first thing you’d notice about Shanti is his communicative attentiveness. He's perpetually checking in, making eye and voice contact. Shanti wants to be in touch, and the feeling is mutual. He is always on my mind, or in the back of my mind. I mind him; he minds me.

From the beginning of our relationship, whenever Shanti did something endearing, I would instinctively utter a soft “oooh,” a monosyllabic and perhaps universal human vocalization, probably recognizable to anyone who has ever held a baby. It’s our human way of expressing love and teaching vowels.

Lately Shanti has been cooing back. My daughter pointed out to me that Shanti’s coo sound is identical to mine. He imitates my “call.” He copies my human intimacy technique, and it works for him-- bigtime on my heartstrings.

I surely inherited my coo-call from my mother who had inherited it from a thousand generations of human parents and perhaps even from beyond the species barrier to our Great Ape ancestors. Now Shanti the Parrot has learned this human cri de couer too. Was it as random as learning the ping of the microwave oven, or as simple as learning my voiceprint, my identity, my name? Or was he really understanding the code for human affection?

Did Shanti choose this sound because it was easy, because it had been repeated so often in his most receptive and teachable moments, or did he want to acknowledge and reciprocate my love? Quoth the raven, Nevermore.

This kind of symbiotic nature-nurture interspecies communication is fascinating. We see something similar in a project designed to help save whooping cranes from extinction. At the Necedah National Wildlife Refuge humans mesh our instincts and our culture to mutual benefit for us and the cranes. In Operation Migration, the critically endangered cranes follow ultralight aircraft to re-establish the ancient migration route that they lost by being hand-raised by costumed humans and hand puppets.




Here our instinct for admiring the grace, beauty and flight of birds is beautifully at work. Our fascination with the technology of flight is derived from our primordial response to the birds who have populated the skies for a 150 million years or so. And now we can apply our infant aeronautical technology --built on our dream love for birds-- to helping the cranes. We guide them home in our planes, and we delight in preserving their lives and their wilderness.

Airplanes, which have delivered so much war, death and toxicity, can also rediscover and recover their bird nature and their original inspiration. It’s all about the cooing. It’s all about love.