For joy in God’s creation: For the first time, a chick was born recently to a pair of whooping cranes at the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute in Virginia near Washington. An egg abandoned in Wisconsin was found and give to the surrogate parents, Tehya, age 16, and Goliath, age 25, who had recently lost two infertile eggs of their own. They took in the replacement egg on 18 May and it hatched eight days later. A month later, the family was thriving, the center’s bird staff said; Goliath and Tehya are good parents. Before colonization there were about 20,000 whooping cranes in this part of North America; by World War II, there were only 21 left – and efforts got underway to save the species. Today about 700 have been counted, some in shelters and others in the wild. (Chris Crowe/SCBI)
Daily Office Asia-Pacific 
