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A 1918 photo of a Christmas tree for horses in Washington, D.C. 

A sign at the 1923 Washington Animal Rescue League Christmas party advertised a "free horse dinner" for all.

Ornithologists And Locals Wonder What The Future Holds For This Chick Being Raised By Much Taller, But Still Doting Parents

— Anne Readel | June 18, 2025

Sandhill Crane and Gosling! A Sandhill Crane Stands Over a Canada Gosling It adopted in Madison, Wisconsin. Such interspecies adoptions appear to have become more common in recent years. Cynthia Carlson

The first time I saw the family, I did a double take. Two tall sandhill crane parents strutted through the marsh, their downy red colt toddling behind them. And then, just a few steps later, came another chick—rounder, fluffier and distinctly yellow. A Canada gosling.

In a small pond in Madison, Wisconsin, a pair of sandhill cranes is raising a baby Canada goose as their own. The combination appears to be only the third confirmed instance of such a cross-species adoption—which was observed previously in Michigan in 2019, and again just last year in Madison. However, an unusual sighting in Alaska in 2011, when a Canada goose was seen living with and behaving like a crane, suggests this kind of adoption may have happened even earlier.

These rare adoptions may be happening more often for several reasons, says Anne Lacy, director of eastern flyway programs at the International Crane Foundation. Sandhill cranes and Canada geese populations have both rebounded in recent decades and, like foxes and coyotes, have proved remarkably adept at moving into urban landscapes. That adaptability has brought them into closer proximity. Geese, which are grazers, can thrive in a wide range of developed spaces, including manicured retention ponds. Cranes, by contrast, are omnivores that still seek out wetlands with more habitat diversity. Suburban wetlands with semi-natural edges—where mowed lawns meet natural vegetation—often offer enough habitat for cranes while still supporting geese, creating an area of ecological overlap. In these shared spaces, the chances for unusual interactions are much higher. At the same time, people are paying closer attention to birds, notes Lacy, and are focusing on this pairing because it’s weird.

Exactly how the gosling ended up with the cranes remains in dispute. Some local photographers believe a Canada goose laid an egg in the cranes’ nest. Others think the cranes took over a goose nest—which already contained a goose egg—after spring floods washed out theirs. Whatever the origin, one thing is certain: When the gosling hatched, it imprinted on the cranes and now follows them as if it were one of their own.

Marjorie Rhine, a local photographer, was one of the first to witness the unusual family. While watching a nesting crane keeping a chick warm beneath its feathers, she was startled when a bright yellow gosling popped out instead of a crane colt. “It’s just hard for your brain to compute. It’s not supposed to be bright yellow,” she says. What struck her most, though, was the way the parent responded. “It just seemed really loving,” she explains.

I watched a similarly surreal and moving scene—a sleek-legged crane doting tenderly on a yellow ball of fluff tucked beside it.

Since then, photographers have captured hours of video footage and thousands of images of the unusual family. Many have watched the cranes treat the gosling just like their own colt: feeding, sheltering and defending it—even from the gosling’s presumed biological parents, a Canada goose pair that have repeatedly tried to reclaim the gosling.

Numerous observers have seen the geese approach the crane family—circling the nest, honking loudly and even charging at the cranes. But when the geese got too close, “Dad was there with his mighty wings,” says Alan Ginsberg, a local photographer who witnessed several such confrontations.

A Sandhill Crane Colt and Canada Gosling nestle against its crane parent in Madison. Alan Ginsberg

Why the cranes accepted the gosling likely comes down to timing and hormones. Michael Ward, an ornithologist at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, has seen just how flexible sandhill cranes can be. He recalls one case where a pair tried to incubate a red rubber ball that had found its way into their nest. And once a chick hatches, the adults are hormonally primed to parent it. “They’re in this maternal or paternal phase, and they’re being protective and supportive,” says Ward.

While the cranes may not care that the gosling waddling after them isn’t biologically theirs, its future is far from certain. Geese and cranes differ in many ways, such as diet, behavior and migration strategies. Cranes feed their young insects, worms and the occasional small mammal. Geese are grazers, built to forage independently. “When I first heard about this last year, I had some real concerns about the gosling,” says Lacy. “They eat very different things.”

I’ve noticed some of their differences when observing them. Instead of nibbling on grass like a typical gosling, this one eagerly slurps down worms offered by its crane parents. The gosling is also a far stronger swimmer than its adoptive parents—zipping circles around them in the water—though it’s clumsier on land as it tries to match the adults’ long-legged stride.

As the gosling matures, migration could present another challenge. “There could be an issue when they become flighted,” Ward says. “Cranes fly higher and migrate at different times of the year than geese do. … By the time it’s got to migrate, something’s going to give.” Cranes often fly at around 5,000 feet—so high they’re often barely visible—while geese typically migrate between 1,000 and 3,000 feet or lower. Their timing also differs: Geese tend to begin migrating in September, if they migrate at all, while cranes from Wisconsin usually depart in October or November—after the first cold snap. Cranes also often travel longer distances to wintering grounds in the southeastern United States, while geese often remain in the Midwest. “It is possible the adopted goose would migrate with the cranes,” Ward says, but “I would expect it would have trouble physiologically.”

A Sandhill Crane Pair takes a stroll with its Colt and adopted Canada Gosling in Madison. Cynthia Carlson

Whether the gosling will make it to adulthood and attempt to migrate remains an open question. While the crane parents are attentive, both of its chicks face risks. The biggest threats to young cranes—and, now, to this gosling—are land-based predators like raccoons, foxes and coyotes, particularly in the early mornings or evenings when the family is out foraging, explains Lacy. Aerial predators like great horned owls are less common, but possible. And snapping turtles, which inhabit the pond, add another threat.

Not all stories like this have happy endings. With the two previously documented adoptions, neither gosling survived. The gosling in Michigan died of unknown causes. The one in Madison last year was killed by a dog. “It was a golden retriever on one of those stretchy leashes, and it got the gosling in its mouth,” recalls Cynthia Carlson, a photographer who documented the 2024 adoption, as well as this year’s. The gosling was taken to a wildlife rescue but died shortly after. “I was so sad that we didn’t get to see how the whole situation ended up,” she says.

Despite the challenges that the gosling faces, local observers still have reasons for hope. Sandhill cranes are known for strong nest site fidelity, often defending the same territory season after season. Ralph Russo, another local photographer who has been photographing the cranes here for a long time, notes the pair at this site have successfully raised multiple offspring over the years. That experience could give both chicks a better-than-average shot, says Lacy. “Nobody likes to see baby animals not make it,” she adds. “But quite honestly, that’s the rule, not the exception.”

Sandhill Cranes!

Ward notes that while a gosling raised by cranes may have a reduced chance of survival, death is far from the only potential outcome. “It’s not like it’s doomed to die,” he says. He also believes the gosling could rejoin its own species, a sentiment that Lacy echoes. “It may just incorporate itself into a gaggle of geese,” she notes.

How this unusual tale will end is uncertain, but Ward hopes people also appreciate the bigger picture. The eastern population of sandhill cranes—which primarily nest in Wisconsin, Michigan and Ontario—has rebounded from fewer than 20,000 birds in 1979 to around 110,000 in 2023 thanks to habitat protection and regulated hunting. Canada geese have experienced a similarly remarkable recovery, increasing from 1.26 million in 1970 to around seven million today. “Fifty years ago, neither species was around here,” Ward explains. “Conservation has brought both of these species back.”

Mikhail Baryshnikov in "Le Jeune Homme et La Mort", 1975

Louis Armstrong narrates "The Night Before Christmas", 1971

1901 General Electric advertisement.

These Proposals Sought To Change The United States’ Name, Abolish The Presidency And The Vice Presidency, And Set A Limit On Personal Fortunes, Among Other Measures

— Greg Daugherty, History Correspondent | October 6, 2025

Only a Fraction of the Nearly 12,000 Proposed Amendments to the Constitution have been ratified into law. Illustration By Meilan Solly, Images Via Senate Democrats Via Wikimedia Commons under CC BY 2.0, Internet Archive and HathiTrust

The United States Constitution had been in effect for little more than a year when Congress first moved to amend it. On September 25, 1789, the legislature sent a dozen proposed amendments to the then-13 states (soon to be 14) for ratification, as the law required. By December 15, 1791, the necessary three-fourths of states had ratified 10 of the 12 amendments, which collectively became known as the Bill of Rights.

Another 17 amendments have been ratified in the 234 years since, for a total of 27. But these measures represent just a tiny fraction of the amendments that have been proposed in Congress over the years—nearly 12,000 to date.

“The U.S. Constitution was intended to be amended,” writes historian Jill Lepore in her new book, We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution. However, “almost all efforts to amend the Constitution fail. Success often takes decades. And for long stretches of American history, amending the Constitution has been effectively impossible.”

Did You Know? The First Amendment Ever Proposed

In 1789, Congress approved a proposed amendment regulating the size of the House of Representatives. But the measure—the first in a series of 12—failed to garner enough support among the states.

The states ratified Articles III through XII, which are now referred to as the Bill of Rights. If Article I had “passed, we could have more than 6,000 representatives today compared to the 435 we currently have,” notes the National Archives in a blog post.

The first page of an original copy of the Bill of Rights, including two amendments that weren't ratified by the States. Photo: Public Domain Via Wikimedia Commons

Most proposed amendments die quietly in congressional committees (if they even get that far), with only a few sent on to the states for ratification. At present, there are six proposed amendments awaiting possible state ratification—one of them dating back to 1789.

Many failed amendments have involved fairly minor administrative matters. But others would have changed the American government in substantial ways and possibly altered the course of history.

Here are a dozen of those failed amendments and what they set out to accomplish.

1. Change The Country’s Name

Wisconsin Representative Lucas Miller. Photo: Public Domain Via Wikimedia Commons

In 1866, Missouri Representative George Washington Anderson proposed dropping “United States” from the country’s name and simply calling it “America.” The current name was “not sufficiently comprehensive and significant to indicate the real unity and destiny of the American people as the eventual, paramount power of this hemisphere,” he argued, albeit unsuccessfully.

Weighing in from across the Atlantic, the Illustrated London News mocked the proposal as the “verbal appropriation of a hemisphere.”

Just one hemisphere wasn’t enough for Lucas Miller, a first-term representative from Wisconsin. On a single February day in 1893, he introduced 46 bills, one of which would have changed the country’s name to the “United States of the Earth.”

Miller’s rationale, in his own words, was that “it is possible for the republic to grow through the admission of new states into the union, until every nation on earth has become part of it.” Another source suggests that he might also have settled for the “United States of the World.” Miller’s proposal was widely ridiculed at the time, and perhaps unsurprisingly, the congressman didn’t return for a second term.

2. Abolish The Presidency

In 1860, on the eve of the Civil War, Missouri Representative John William Noell suggested abolishing the office of president and replacing it with a three-person executive council elected by separate regions of the country. The proposal would have given each member veto power over the other two.

Even after the Civil War, proposals to abolish the presidency arose from time to time. In 1878, Ohio Representative Milton Isaiah Southard introduced a resolution much like Noell’s, to create a three-person executive council, with one president each for the Western states, the Southern states, and the combined “Eastern and Middle” states. Southard argued that “the people of this country are opposed to monarchy, or the ‘one-man power’ created by the accumulation of regal power in the hands of one person in the control and direction of their public affairs.”

3. End Term Limits For Presidents

While some proposed amendments have tried to limit how long a president could serve, others have gone in the opposite direction.

In fact, since the 1951 ratification of the 22nd Amendment, which set the limit at two terms, legislators have repeatedly attempted to repeal that measure and allow presidents to serve as many terms as they choose.

Franklin D. Roosevelt was the only American President to serve more than two terms. Public Domain Via Wikimedia Commons

According to the Congressional Research Service, supporters of term limits believe they serve as “an essential check to the cult of personality and the potential for excessive presidential power.” Opponents maintain that the 22nd Amendment is “inherently undemocratic, in that it prohibits the voters from electing a qualified candidate they favor.”

Although an existing amendment has only been repealed once (when the 21st Amendment, ratified in 1933, repealed the 18th Amendment, which instituted Prohibition), efforts to end or expand presidential term limits continue, including as recently as 2025.

4. Elect The President By Lot

Numerous amendments have tried to change how Americans elect their president, but few have been more novel than the proposal put forth by James Hillhouse, a senator from Connecticut, in 1808. He suggested, first, that senators be elected to three-year, rather than six-year, terms, staggered so that one-third of their terms would end each year. The senators whose terms were expiring would then choose a new president from among their ranks, with each drawing a ball from a box. The senator who picked the lone colored ball would become president for one year.

Unusual as Hillhouse’s proposal may have been, he wasn’t the first to suggest a lottery as a means of appointing the president. At the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787, Pennsylvania delegate James Wilson floated a plan in which a small group of congresspeople, chosen by lot, would gather to make the decision. “It was an inventive idea,” says David O. Stewart, author of The Summer of 1787: The Men Who Invented the Constitution, “but nobody thought it was a very good one.”

5. Abolish The Vice Presidency

A page from Herman V. Ames' compendium of proposed amendments Internet Archive

In 1897, Herman V. Ames, a historian at the University of Pennsylvania, published a list of proposed constitutional amendments dating back to the very beginning of the nation’s history. He recorded seven attempts to abolish the office of vice president, with some critics referring to the position as “superfluous.” One early proponent was none other than Hillhouse, the same man who’d suggested selecting the president by lot.

Similar efforts continued into the 20th century, led by both politicians and other prominent voices. Testifying before Congress in 1975, the presidential historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. also called the office “superfluous.” “I know that presidents say ritualistically they are going to give their vice presidents something to do,” he said, “but this never has amounted to much.”

Schlesinger went on to describe the office as one of “spectacular and, I believe, uncurable frustration” for its occupants. “Few vice presidents have survived the systematic demoralization inflicted by the office without serious injury to themselves,” he argued.

6. Add More Vice Presidents

While some would-be amenders have sought to do away with the job of vice president entirely, others have insisted that what the country really needs is more seconds-in-command.

In 1881, for example, Georgia Representative Nathaniel Job Hammond suggested creating a first, second and third vice president. More recently, in 1964, New York Senator Kenneth Keating proposed splitting the office in two, with an executive vice president and a legislative vice president.

John Adams served as the nation's first vice president. Public Domain Via Wikimedia Commons

7. Abolish The U.S. Senate

In 1911, Wisconsin Representative Victor Berger, the first socialist to be elected to Congress, introduced an amendment intended to shutter the Senate, calling it “an obstructive and useless body, a menace to the liberties of the people, and an obstacle to social growth.”

With the Senate out of the way, Berger’s amendment would have concentrated all legislative power in the House. Its decisions would be “the supreme law,” the resolution stated, “and the president shall have no power to veto them, nor shall any court have any power to invalidate them.”

Berger must have known that his proposal was purely symbolic, since the process for passing amendments requires Senate approval, and it was highly unlikely that its members would willingly put themselves out of a job.

Wisconsin Representative Victor Berger Public Domain Via Wikimedia Commons

8. Abolish The Electoral College

Choosing the American president through the Electoral College rather than by direct vote of the people was controversial from the start. As the historian Ames wrote in 1897, “No part of the Constitution has caused so much dissatisfaction and hence given rise to so many amendments to effect a change.”

A major reason for the dissatisfaction is that the Electoral College vote and the popular vote do not always align, making it possible for a candidate to win the popular vote but ultimately lose the election. This has happened five times to date, in the presidential elections of 1824, 1876, 1888, 2000 and 2016.

Among the many attempts to abolish the Electoral College, the most recent appears to be that of Tennessee Representative Steve Cohen in December 2024. “Americans expect and deserve to see the winner of the national popular vote for any elected office assume the office as its legitimate winner,” he said at the time. “The Electoral College is a vestige of the 18th century, when voters didn’t know the candidates. Today, presidential candidates are widely known and regularly appear on Americans’ phones and television screens.”

One amendment to replace the Electoral College with direct elections did come pretty close to succeeding in 1969, when the House passed it by a 338-to-70 vote. However, the measure died in the Senate.

9. Create A Court That Could Overrule Even The U.S. Supreme Court

Asserting that the U.S. Supreme Court has too often overstepped its authority in striking down state laws, some amendments have proposed creating an even higher court with the power to review and nullify Supreme Court decisions. The first of these seems to have been offered in 1867 by Senator Garrett Davis of Kentucky, who called for a “tribunal” consisting of one member appointed by each state. Later legislators advanced similar proposals for a court made up of the Supreme Court justices of each state, a concept that came to be known as the “Court of the Union.”

The idea attracted new attention during the 1960s, when dissatisfaction with recent Supreme Court rulings led representatives from Southern states to call for a “Court of the Union.” At least 15 proposals for an amendment to that effect came before Congress between 1963 and 1981.

10. Limit Personal Fortunes

In 1933, often considered the bleakest year of the Great Depression, Wesley Lloyd, a representative from Washington State, proposed giving Congress the authority to establish a cap on the personal wealth of Americans. Perhaps to soften the blow, he proposed that the limit be set no lower than $1 million (about $25.7 million today). “The only reason there is a widespread poverty,” he told Congress, “is that wealth and the ownership of wealth has become centralized—the only reason many men are too poor is because a few men are too rich.”

11. Allow The American People To Vote On Wars

The power to declare war, which the Constitution invests in Congress, has long been a subject of controversy—and attempted amendments. For example, in 1916, the year before the U.S. entered World War I, Representative Denver Samuel Church of California offered an amendment requiring that declarations of war first be put to a popular vote and win the approval of a majority of Americans. He did allow for certain exceptions, such as an invasion of the U.S. by a foreign country. Numerous similar amendments have followed in the years since, particularly in the 1930s, as war in Europe loomed.

12. Make War Illegal