So... yesterday, Nan Barnett and I (as I recounted in a previous status update) met a woman who manually stimulates whooping cranes to collect their semen for a living. And who gives a talk about her work... every Valentines Day... with a demonstration. (Wow.) She was, needless to say, both fascinating and VERY entertaining. We sat down next to her in OHare Airport. Valerie (that was her name), Nan, and I were all waiting for the same plane. She had an odd-looking cooler sitting with her -- plugged into the socket -- so I asked her about it. Inside, she explained to us, were two incubating whooping crane eggs. As a keeper with the Calgary Zoo, her job is to breed the birds, which are very endangered, and take their eggs to Patuxent, MD, where they hatch and (eventually) fly back home to Canada. (They use ultra-light aircraft to train them.) Super-cool. And she had a GREAT sense of humor about her somewhat embarrassing job responsibilities. And heres where this gets amazing. See... during the flight, one of the birds started to peck its way out of its egg. So when we landed in Baltimore, she grabbed me just after we disembarked -- Nan, sadly, had gone to the restroom -- pulled me aside, opened the cooler, and revealed a little tiny beak poking through a four-millimeter hole in what proved to be an enormous egg. And I have to admit: I teared up a little. What a miraculous thing Valerie does! What a beautiful flight we just happened to be on! It gave me such a sense of hope. I will never forget what I saw. Valerie from the Calgary Zoo, I think youre spectacular. Thank you for sharing your work with us. And thank you for everything you do.
Posted on: Fri, 06 Jun 2014 14:37:18 +0000
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