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Even predators make deadly mistakes sometimes, as visitors to Utah's Hogle Zoo observed Sunday.
A 17-year-old, captive-bred African lanner falcon performing in the 11 a.m. "World of Flight" bird show at the Salt Lake City zoo deviated from its usual routine and landed in — of all places — the wolves' lair, zoo spokeswoman Erica Hansen said Tuesday.
"We know how quickly those wolves will jump into action," she said, confirming what people outside the pen saw — the falcon had time to stretch its wings and make a squawking noise before it was killed.
"We were devastated by it and still are," said Steve Chindgren, who noted he has run the bird show for 37 years, performing about 330 times annually for about 140,000 spectators. "He was quite an asset to our show. It was really a fluke, tragic accident."
The falcon's name was Maximus, but the half dozen members of the World of Flight team also called him "Max of the Mountains." The nickname reflected some of his youthful wanderings, when he would catch thermal winds and soar off over the Wasatch Mountains, sending Chindgren on rescue missions that sometimes lasted overnight.
Since he got older, Chindgren said, Maximus didn't take off nearly as much.
"In the last year, we had to recover him, like, three times," the trainer said, noting that he tracked the falcon with attached monitoring gear. "He was always sitting in a tree waiting for us."
Not Sunday.
While Chindgren wasn't too concerned when Maximus took off, he turned over the show to his assistant right away and started following the tracking beacon.
His feelings changed as soon as he saw the wolves around the bird.
"They were playing with it, not eating it, just kind of cat-and-mousing it," he said. "My stomach just dropped. I didn't even tell my staff until we finished the show. They really loved this bird. They probably wouldn't have been able to deal with it."
Chindgren has a variety of birds in his show — six hawks, three eagles, ravens, macaws as well as falcons — but, at age 67, he doesn't know if he has the endurance to try to train a replacement for Maximus.
"Literally thousands of hours of work goes into the performance of a bird flying," he said.
Maximus will be buried in East Canyon, near a spot where Chindgren encountered a cougar several years ago while looking for another errant flier.