Alice was known for walking with a slight limp in her left leg after undergoing surgery two years ago that gave her a brace to help with damaged ligaments.

       The Stanley crane died Jan. 28 at the National Zoo, in Northwest Washington, during a surgery to “correct a limb deformity,” officials at the facility said in a statement that was released Wednesday. She was 7 years old.

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       Officials said Stanley cranes usually live to be about 13 if they’re in human care.

       Alice, Stanley crane died Jan. 28 at the National Zoo during a surgery to “correct a limb deformity. She was 7-years-old. (The Washington Post)

       Zookeepers said Alice was a bird with a “larger-than-life personality” and would often greet her caretakers by “dancing,” which meant flapping her wings in the way that cranes greet each other, and jumping. Sometimes she would make a sound like purring, which young cranes do to communicate with their parents, experts said.

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       Stanley cranes are found in the wild in Namibia and South Africa. They’re considered vulnerable by the International Union for Conservation of Nature because they’ve suffered a loss of their habitat and run into power lines.

       At the zoo, Alice had a unique life as a crane.

       She was born in July 2014. Her sibling was the first egg to hatch, and zookeepers thought the other egg, which was Alice, was a dud because her parents’ second eggs had often been infertile. But when keepers pulled Alice’s egg from the nest, they heard a chick making noise. They put her in an incubator, and the next day she hatched.

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       A zoo donor named her Alice in honor of the donor’s mother.

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       Because Alice had been pulled from the nest, her parents would have rejected her, so zookeepers said they had to hand-raise her. She “socially bonded” with her keepers and two flamingo chicks that were also being hand-raised.

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       Alice became a star at the zoo, doing “meet-and-greet demonstrations” for visitors. Zookeepers said she was “upbeat, enthusiastic and even-tempered.”

       But she always had trouble with the deformity to one of her legs.

       She underwent a surgery two years ago that involved putting an internal brace suture inside her joint to make an “artificial lateral ligament,” keepers said. Zoo experts said it was rare for such a procedure to have been done on a Stanley crane. She recovered but always walked with a slight limp.

       Last fall, Alice showed signs of leg troubles again. Experts found in a CT scan that she had a deformity in her ankle bones, and they tried to perform surgery to relieve pressure on her ankle joints. During the procedure, Alice went into cardiac arrest and died.

       “Alice expressed her happiness and joy every day of her life, and in doing so gave those that had the great privilege to care for her an unforgettable experience,” said Heather Anderson, who was Alice’s primary keeper at the Bird House, in a statement. “Everybody who knew her loved her.”