When I had a TV set in the 80s, I saw a documentary programme about a Hokkaidō National Park warden who found an abandoned crane’s nest after the heavy rain flooded most of the park.
He took the egg home and incubated it in his oven, getting up every few hours to turn it over, apologising to it for disturbing its sleep.
After it hatched, it followed him everywhere, as he was mummy, being the first creature it saw upon hatching.*
When it got big, the warden felt it needed to learn to fly and go somewhere else to start its own life. He started off running up and down the paddock, with the young crane chasing him close behind.
A few more sessions later, he started to flap his arms while he was running, and the young crane mimicked him.
One day, the flapping raised the crane into the air.
So, a human taught a bird how to fly, haha.
When the crane found a mate, it brought her home to “mummy”, then their children when they were born.
Year after year, they’d come home to visit “mummy”. Sweet.
(Japan, 1980s)
* Reminds me of Austrian zoologist Konrad Lorenz (1903–1989) and his geese. Google: Quote In his classic experiment, Lorenz divided eggs laid by a greylag goose into two groups. One of the groups was hatched by their mother and immediately began following her around. The second group was hatched in an incubator, but in the absence of their mother, they began instead to follow Lorenz. Unquote
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