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A Sight to Behold You bend over to get a closer look at the 2-week-old chick sitting in a small dish atop the counter, where it’s dining on bits of anole (lizard) and pinky (baby mice), meal worms and crickets. The chick is nothing special, you think. Cute in a scrawny, baby-bird kind of way, still sporting muted grayish-brown pinfeathers. Certainly there’s no hint of the beauty that will soon blossom. Until this spring, when several hatchings were reported at North American zoos, including two at Lincoln Park Zoo, only 59 of the Guam subspecies of Micronesian kingfisher, Halcyon cinnamomina cinnamomina, remained in the world – and all lived in captivity. The brown tree snake, believed to have been carried to Guam on cargo planes during and after World War II, wiped out much of the island’s population of kingfisher, though not before the remaining 29 birds could be rescued in the 1980s. Those birds and their offspring are now part of an international breeding and reintroduction program. The two chicks hatched by Lincoln Park Zoo’s breeding pair in May could one day produce offspring of their own who will live in the forests on Guam, where the island’s indigenous people, the Chamorro, refer to the bird as Sihek. “ We’re hand-rearing them here at the zoo based on the recommendation of the Micronesian Kingfisher Species Survival Plan,” says Nicole Kehl, lead keeper at the McCormick Bird House, as she picks up a meal worm with tweezers and drops it into the chick’s gaping beak. “The main reason for that is the kingfisher is such an endangered bird. Our female is a first-time mom, so a lot of things could go wrong if she were to raise the chicks by herself. The SSP said, ‘Let’s help these chicks through this, and then we’ll give the mom a chance to raise chicks on her own somewhere down the road.’ ” “A male and a female from North American zoos were sent to Guam in April to help develop the breeding program there,” says Joanne Earnhardt, Ph.D., Lincoln Park Zoo’s director of conservation biology and a member of the Micronesian Kingfisher Recovery Committee. “That was quite a big deal because young people there have never seen kingfishers. But those birds will not be released in the wild. We hope their offspring will be, if we can get the number of birds high enough to provide juveniles for a wild population.” No one knows for certain when birds hatched in captivity might be released from the island center that is maintained by the Guam Division of Agriculture and Wildlife Resources. “ After several disappointing years for the whole North American population, this year several birds hatched at Lincoln Park and other zoos,” Earnhardt says. “We don’t know yet how many of those have survived, but the hatchings give us a lot of hope for the population’s future.” Seeing some of those hatchlings eventually released in their native habitat would indeed be a beautiful thing. Click here to learn more about Micronesian kingfishers. |
And
then it hits you: Despite appearances, the bird you see is one of the rarest
in the world. Beautiful or not,
it’s a sight to behold.
Through
their first few weeks, says Kehl, the chicks have showed every sign of growing
into strong, healthy young birds. They are hearty eaters and in the first
week gained nearly 20 percent of their adult body weight. Keepers feed them
every two hours. By about day 50 the chicks should be completely self-feeding.
Now in their fourth week, the chicks have lost most of their lusterless pinfeathers
and are beginning to display the colors of adult plumage: upper feathers
of iridescent greenish-blue, buffy underparts and cinnamon-colored cap.