Posts Tagged ‘Birds’

Sep
02

Raven’s name!

Posted by bschaefer in Behind the Scenes,Birds,Natural Encounters

At long last we have bestowed upon our Lady Raven a name.  There was much debate and deliberation over what would fit this bird.  Several people suggested Lenore and it was definitely hard to resist this one, but since Poe’s Lenore came to a mysterious and untimely end, we thought perhaps we wouldn’t invite fate along on this quest for a name.  If you are following along with the comments, you might have seen Kara suggest the name ”Quoth” so when we introduced her during a presentation we could say “This is Quoth…the raven”.  Zoo Keeper’s tend to have a quirky sense of humor so this was a  front runner for a long time, but when we call her to us from a distance, it’s difficult to say “Here Quoth”.  So back to the drawing board.

We are enjoying working with her immensely, but she definitely keeps us on our toes!  She can be soliciting a scratch or a play session one second and then clacking her beak at you and attempting to abscond with your treat container the next.  She definitely has her own ideas about what she wants to do and how a training session should progress, and although we shied away from Lenore, we thought an obscure Poe reference could be in order.

So all the factors; her flight was delayed because of a storm, she changes moods on a dime, Poe reference….hmmmm…

Finally we hit on the perfect name!

We’d like to introduce Tempest the Raven!

 

 

Natural Encounters Keeper Amelia plays a game of tug-of-war with Tempest as Supervisor Amanda watches the fun.

We hope you like our choice and we are looking forward to blogging about all our adventures training with and being educated by Tempest.  She is learning so fast we can hardly keep up and we hope to have her public debut in the next few months.

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Aug
17

Encounter Our Green Aracari

Posted by bschaefer in Behind the Scenes,Birds,Natural Encounters

Natural Encounters Keeper Priscilla is clearly on Pico's "Friends" list

Our members and frequent guests would probably describe Natural Encounters as a place where you can see many species from many habitats all in one place.  We specialize in mixed species exhibits and in bringing our animals out onto the public floor for, well, encounters.  One of our popular birds that you might see in either the indoor or the outdoor rain forest exhibits is Pico, our collard aracari (ahr-uh-SAHR-ee).  He’s quite the charmer with his fancy colors and the way he approaches the front of the exhibit to get a closer look at guests. 

Pico is an inredible animal to work with, but unfortunately he has strong likes and dislikes as far as individuals.  He doesn’t hesitate to let you know how he feels about you the moment he meets you.  So, much as we adore him, as far as an encounter candidate, he’s maybe not the best.  Pico has been able to teach our guests that these birds range from Central through South America and that they are related to toucans as well as many other facts about aracari’s. Don’t forget to tell Pico how handsome he is when you see him!

Because we had come to love aracari’s so much through Pico, we were thrilled when we got a call recently from the Houston SPCA about an aracari that was confiscated from an individual that could not properly care for the large numbers of birds they had aquired.  This aracari was reportedly very friendly and loved everyone she met.  We went right over to the SPCA to meet her.  She was everything they told us, with personality plus!  We quickly made arrangements for quarantine space and she came to the zoo.  She has been given a clean bill of health by our veterinary staff and has now moved to her permanent home in Natural Encounters.

Meet Olivia, the green aracari!  She will be making appearances at Natural Encounters so stop by on your visits to the zoo and learn more cool facts about aracari’s and their rain forest homes!

Get your own bird's eye view of Olivia, our new green aracari when you visit Natural Encounters!

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Aug
10

The Flamingo Gym

Posted by Rochelle Joseph in Birds

Exercise for 30 minutes a day makes you grow big and strong.

Currently, it’s recommended that for a healthy lifestyle everyone should get at least 30 minutes of exercise a day.  This is not only true for people, but it is also true for our growing flamingos. 

Since flamingos have such long legs and grow so very quickly, it is easy for them to outgrow the strength of their legs. They have to be monitored each day to make sure they’re gaining enough weight, but not so much that it could possibly cause too much strain on those spindly gams. 

2-day-old chick

34-day-old chick

Above you can see just how dramatic their growth is. As they do, we provide them with that much more space to move around. Though the chicks may start in small plastic brooders, they soon take up residence in outside pens where there’s plenty of  space to flourish.  But even though they are in a larger area, we still have them get additional exercise in 2 main ways:  swimming and walking. 

The spacious pens mean room to grow

To help keep up their strength,  they are set out to play several times a day in a small swimming pool.  This allows them to bathe, eat, and socialize together. 

We also have them walk around the off-exhibit area to develop their coordination and make their legs strong.  They have learned to follow us and we use this to get them to run and play!

The next step to making sure they get enough exercise is taking them for longer walks – like out to the Flamingo Exhibit to swim in the large pool, and also to be introduced to the adult flamingos.

We can’t wait to have you see it, so stay tuned for the next post!

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Aug
04

Baby Flamingo Gruel a.k.a Fishy Goodness!

Posted by Rochelle Joseph in Birds

As mentioned in our last post about the Houston Zoo’s baby Flamingos, here is the recipe for the Flamingo Food.  And just below, a fantastic little video of how we make it that’s too entertaining not to watch!

 Flamingo Hand Rearing Formula (Diet)

 720g Infant rice cereal flakes (soaked in water)
720g Shrimp
720g Smelt/Capelin (whole/thawed) – heads/tails/fins removed
720g Hard-boiled egg yolks
1 cup Vionate
1 cc Thiamin-Vitamin E paste
~12 cups water 
 

1.) Soak Rice cereal in water (according to directions) – set- aside 720 g of soaked rice cereal

2.) Peel shrimp and dice, blend well with ~1-2 cups of water

3.) Take heads, fins, and tails off of the fish, dice, blend well with ~1-2 cups of water

4) Blend egg yolks, vionate, and thiamin with ~1-2 cup of water

5.) Mix all ingredients together and blend well

6.) Strain formula and blend remainder, strain again.

7.) Divide up into smaller batches to freeze. Fresh made formula will keep in the fridge for 24 – 48 hours

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Aug
02

Growing Up Flamingo: Swimming and Feeding

Posted by Rochelle Joseph in Birds

Flamingos grow-up quickly… sort of… they will need us to help feed them for at least the next 90 days – so they will still be babies in that sense.  However, in just a span of 3 months they will grow from being about 10 inches high to being over 3 feet tall.  Growing this quickly means that we have to keep a close eye on the development of the flamingo’s legs. Flong-legged birds, it is very important that the chicks do not outgrow their leg strength.

Flamingos hatch out with very dense white/gray down.  This down helps them keep warm and dry.  It also makes them very buoyant.  When chicks are just 2 – 3 days old, the parents will often taken them for their first swim.  Swimming is great exercise for baby flamingos, as it helps their legs develop properly. To mimic this, we start swimming the flamingo chicks when they are just a couple of days old.

The Fuzzy Bunch takes their first swim!

Swimming is just one form of exercise that the flamingo chicks receive.  Several times a day they are placed in “play-pens” with all the other chicks. This allows them to start interacting with others and also show off their ability to bathe themselves (a behavior that they start almost from the time they hatch).

Each flamingo chick has its own distinct personality. Some are very sweet, others like to bite.  This distinction can be seen when they interact with each other. Watch this:

One of the other ways we definitely notice the chick’s personality is when we’re feeding them. Some of the chicks will sit quietly and eat, others like to run around the table.  Some don’t mind if the formula is warm, others want the formula to be exactly 104.6º or they throw food every where. When you’re feeding a formula made of pureed fish and shrimp, having the formula spit back out on you it is not necessarily a pleasant experience. 

A wee bite of the hand that feeds.

This little one needs a napkin.

Now here's how you eat politely!

We’ll share this delictable recipe in the next post, for those among you who are conniseurs… and show a delightful demonstration of just how it’s made, so please stop back!

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Jul
28

Lady Raven’s identity

Posted by bschaefer in Behind the Scenes,Birds,Natural Encounters

Natural Encounters Keeper Amelia with our finally identified Lady Raven.

No longer will we need to sit  engaged in guessing, with multiple syllables expressing the gender of Raven.  We got the lab tests results and SHE will grow into a beautiful Lady as she gets older.  Now comes the fun part, choosing her name!  We’d love to hear suggestions from the audience!

 

 

 

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Jul
25

Raven’s eyes from an iPhone

Posted by bschaefer in Behind the Scenes,Birds,Natural Encounters

Well, (stately raven of the saintly days of yore) doesn’t exactly apply to our kid quite yet.  While (s)he is getting much better at balancing and is developing flight muscles, it’s still a bit of a toss up if the intended landing target will be hit or not, and sometimes watching Raven getting from one side of the enclosure to the other can be quite entertaining for the staff! Still a bit of a clumsy juvenile.

We are all  getting very excited about the end of quarantine.  August 1st is the official day and then we can take her/him to Natural Encounters.  We also sent in a few feathers this week to a lab that will run a DNA test and give us the answer to our Lord vs Lady question. I will be happy to stop using either/or gender references and we can hardly wait for the results so we can choose a name! Any bets on whether it be Lord or Lady? What name should we choose?

In the mean time, here are some pictures from our play session today.  Raven is very curious about my iPhone.  Both of these shots clearly show the blue/gray color of a juvenile raven’s eyes. They will turn brown as Raven matures this year.

Raven checks out my iPhone.

My pretty gray eyes will be brown when I grow up.

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Jul
23

A Flamingo Chick’s First Day at the Houston Zoo

Posted by Rochelle Joseph in Birds

5 AM on July 2: The first keeper to arrive in the department checked the hatcher. It was a special day, because they found our first hatched flamingo!!

July 2, 5 AM: The first flamingo chick hatches

Flamingo chicks hatch out covered with very thick white or grey down (they are the softest chicks we have ever had).  Their legs are pinkish and they have completely straight beaks.  They look so very unlike adult flamingos that the first time you see one in person it is a little shocking.

The first two flamingo chicks. As you can see, they don't look like you'd expect.

After the chick dry off from hatching, we check their umbilicus site (basically a bird’s belly button) and make sure it is clean.  We also weigh the chicks.  The first chick weighed about 85 grams or 3 ounces – this is about half the weight of an I-phone.

The chick's belly button. Look at those little feet!!

For the first 24 hours of a baby flamingo’s life, it gets nutrition from its yolk sac (the yolk part of the egg is absorbed into the digestive system).  Just to make sure the chick stays well hydrated while it continues to absorb its yolk, we provide the chick some warm fluids about 8-10 hours after it hatches.  Then it goes back into the brooder box until its first feeding the following morning.

The chick getting warm fluids about 8-10 hours after hatching

When the chick has absorbed its yolk fully, we begin to feed it a diluted formula.  This formula is specially made for flamingos out of shrimp, fish, baby cereal, egg yolks and vitamins.  The formula smells awful, but is very good for the growing chicks. So finally, about 12 – 24 hours after the chick hatches, we give them their first taste of that food.

The little one after it's first feeding.

Please come back to read and see what’s next in the life of our flamingo chicks!

Editors note: Please let us know what you think of these little beauties in the comment section. And please share their story on your Facebook and Twitter accounts. We’ve made it easy for you to do; simply click their links just below!

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Jul
20

Is That Flamingo Egg Talking?

Posted by Rochelle Joseph in Birds

As we hope you read in our first post  just a few days ago, we here at the Houston Zoo welcomed 10 Chilean Flamingo eggs not long ago. 

Once they arrived, we had to make sure they were kept in the right environment.  To do this, we put the eggs in an artificial incubator.  This machine keeps the eggs at around 99 º and rocks the eggs gently side to side once every hour.  

The incubator with flamingo eggs inside

When our eggs arrived at the zoo, we carefully candled them (we held the egg up to a bright light to see what the developing embryo was doing) and then placed them in the incubators. While the egg shown in the picture is not a flamingo egg, it still shows the embryo and the development of a chick in the eggs (the dark circular spot near the center is the chick’s eye).  

"Candling" the Flamingo egg to see the baby bird developing inside

Since the chicks’ hatching was looming, we also had to set up the room where they would spend the first several weeks of their life: the brooder room.  This is much like setting up the nursery when a new baby is coming home! Laundry has to be done, dishes have to be washed and beds have to be made.  We wanted to make sure everything was perfect for the new kids.   

New chicks are generally brooded (or kept warm) by their parents.  To simulate this we use “brooder boxes,” small plastic boxes that have a heater source to keep the chicks warm and comfortable.  For the flamingo chicks, we have been using brooders from www.petiatric.com; the owner was very kind and managed to get 3 new brooders shipped to Houston in just 2 days, so that the little flamingos’ homes would be ready.   

One of three new brooder boxes to help the babies grow

 One of the eggs had externally pipped on the way to Houston.  During the drive, Cory could hear the chick vocalizing in the egg.  This egg was placed into a hatcher – a machine that keeps the humidity high and the temperature at a constant 99 º, the optimal temperature for a hatching chick.   

As we placed the egg in the hatcher we could hear the chick vocalizing and see the egg rocking back-and-forth from the movement of the chick.  We had the good fortune to get a little snippet of it to show you! 
  

Make sure to come back for the next post to follow the chick’s progress. What do you think happens next? 

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Jul
14

Raven’s Beguiling

Posted by bschaefer in Animal Info,Behind the Scenes,Birds,Natural Encounters

Raven has settled in nicely after the long flight from Alaska and has certainly beguiled us all into smiling in short order!  The 30 day quarantine period is always difficult for keepers who are eagerly awaiting their new charges.  The clinic keepers are primarily responsible for the care of the animals during this quarantine time, but because Raven requires a great deal of handling, the Natural Encounters staff has been visiting at the end of their shifts to offer some more hands on time.  As you can see, Raven is happy to see just about anyone that will offer food, and has quickly learned to step up onto our hands for a treat or a scratch.

Natural Encounters Keeper Kamryn offering a very vocal Raven a get-to-know-you scratch

Natural Encounters Supervisor, PJ....clearly beguiled!

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