By Maureen Pratt | Catholic News Service

I thought it was a joke. The newspaper photo of a smiling man in a white bird costume with a whooping crane hand puppet seemed more fit for the April Fool's Day issue than a Sunday in March.

But as I read through the accompanying article, originally published in the Baltimore Sun, my sense of humor gradually turned into one of those obvious "aha" moments that are very worth sharing here as we approach Mother's Day and Father's Day.

Turns out that a 15-year project in which adults dressed up as whooping cranes in order to teach basic living and survival skills to real whooping crane chicks ended in more tragedy than triumph because, researchers concluded, whooping crane parents are better suited to raise their chicks than costumed humans.

Whooping cranes are an endangered North American bird. To ensure their survival, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, with several public and private organizations, formed the Whooping Crane Eastern Partnership.

At the Patuxent Research Refuge in Laurel, Maryland, whooping crane chicks are bred and raised, taught to eat and how to survive in the wild, and, with a human piloting an ultralight aircraft, shown how to migrate.

Human intervention was key in each stage of the project. Protocols included:

-- "Costumes, designed to disguise the human form, will be supplied by (the project) and used in conjunction with hand-held puppets of adult cranes and recordings of crane calls."

-- "Absolutely NO TALKING will be tolerated within earshot of the birds."

-- "To reinforce the 'follow the aircraft' response, efforts will be made to minimize the number of times a chick is led by a walking handler. However, during early conditioning, it may be safer to lead chicks to the aircraft rather than to carry them."

But as carefully designed as the project was, and as earnest as all the participants were to save and increase the number of whooping cranes, the "human touch" turned out to be much less successful than allowing whooping crane parents to raise their own chicks.

In January 2016, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service went "back to nature" and future generations of whooping crane chicks born at the Patuxent Refuge will be raised by their feathered mothers and fathers.

As I consider the results of the Patuxent project, I can't help but see a parallel with human parenting.

From television as babysitters to computers as teachers, in today's rapidly changing and demanding world, it can be tempting to leave at least some of human parenting to gadgets. As children age and move into their brash new world, the energy required to keep track of and steer children away from every negative influence and pitfall can seem nearly impossible to muster for an overworked mom or dad.

And, as society imposes more pressures on parents to cede their authority to others for even the most basic of their responsibilities, it might seem as if the simple family structure -- and the nurturing it provides -- is obsolete.

But this tale of humans and whooping cranes, although on the surface one of failure, is actually one of hope and promise: Parents are crucial to the raising of their children. Children learn most effectively and first from their parents. The value of the family shines brightly against any mechanical or superimposed, completely unrelated entity.

Put another way, my life would have been vastly different and, I dare say, a complete catastrophe had I been raised by whooping cranes!

Long live Mom and Dad!

Pratt's website is www.maureenpratt.com.