Audubon Zoo's Whooping Crane Legacy

In the fall of 1940 a farmer in Evangeline Parish found a whooping crane with a gunshot wing and took her for a sandhill. A federal game agent talked him into sending her to Audubon Zoo, where she lived alone until 1948 and then went to the refuge at Aransas, Texas. She came back in late 1951 with an injured male named Crip. Over the next decade Josephine laid 52 eggs that produced twelve chicks, four of them surviving to adulthood. Two hatched in 1957: George and Georgette. The zoo still breeds cranes for release in Vermilion Parish.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Lafayette Cemetery No. 1 — 2.8 mi
  The Garden District's 1833 cemetery of about 1,100 family tombs, closed to visitors in 2019 and reopened on October 1, 2026 for small guided tours run by the Preservation Resource Center.
• St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 — 4.4 mi
  New Orleans' oldest surviving city of the dead, opened in 1789 after the fire of 1788 and the burial place of Homer Plessy, reachable only on a guided tour since March 2015.
• New Orleans Jazz National Historical Park — 4.6 mi
  A National Park Service unit created in 1994 to tell where jazz came from, with free programs and a visitor center in the French Quarter and park land inside Louis Armstrong Park.
• The Historic New Orleans Collection — 4.6 mi
  A French Quarter museum and research center founded in 1966, whose 2015 Purchased Lives exhibition took on New Orleans' place as the largest slave market in antebellum America.

More markers nearby

• Boré Plantation - Audubon Park — steps away
• Audubon Zoo — steps away
• The Original Teddy Bear — 0.3 mi
• Audubon Park History — 0.3 mi