Wild swan chase: Downed bird brings adventure to INL employees
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When he went to work early the morning of Nov. 11, little did KC Crump realize that in a matter of hours he would be working up a sweat chasing a wild, potentially injured tundra swan through the sagebrush.
It was 5 degrees Fahrenheit around 8 a.m. when Crump, a laborer for Idaho National Laboratory, arrived at a facility on the lab’s desert site, the Specific Manufacturing Capability, to remove some of the new snow that had fallen the night before. As they walked across the parking lot toward the SMC cafeteria, Crump and his co-worker Ricky Hernandez noticed some strange tracks. Circular and about five inches in diameter, they first thought the tracks might have been left by a moose. But when they looked over to the northwest corner of the fence, they saw a white swan on the ground with some blood on its wing.