superchlorine

I recently watched a video of a pair of Sandhill Cranes raising a Canada Gosling, and it seems that it isn't the first example of it in the last few years. Are cranes like penguins where they will steal eggs/hatchlings if they had an unsuccessful breeding season, or is there some other reason that they 'adopt' baby geese?

If you follow enough birding groups in Sandhill crane territory, you’ll eventually see someone post a baby duckling or goose that is following around a pair of cranes. It’s not common, but it happens enough to be a thing!

Sandhill cranes don’t seem to steal babies, but they have an extremely strong parenting instinct. If they find a baby that needs taking care of, you can bet they’re going to take damn good care of it. There are documented cases of Sandhill cranes adopting unrelated crane chicks as well as geese and domestic ducks. They just love babies. There has even been some research into using Sandhill cranes as foster parents for endangered whooping cranes in order to re-establish a non migrating population of the latter. Sandhill cranes are super parents!