Toledo Zoo announces recent hatching of brown kiwi chick

THE BLADE

 MAY 16, 2019

 The Toledo Zoo announced Thursday that a female North Island brown kiwi chick recently hatched at the zoo’s Avian Breeding Center.

The egg was laid Jan. 9 at the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute, which is affiliated with the National Zoo in Washington, D.C. Staff there determined the developing embryo inside was a female through sophisticated blood-draw techniques.

They drove the egg to the Toledo Zoo several weeks before its expected hatch date to finish incubating here. The yet-to-be-named chick hatched March 21, appears healthy, and is currently being raised off-exhibit.

North Island brown kiwi are one of five existing kiwi species endemic to New Zealand. Only about half of all kiwi eggs hatch successfully and nearly 90 percent of chicks die within six months.

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Rare bird born at the Toledo Zoo

Feb 07, 2013 (Menafn - The Blade - McClatchy-Tribune Information Services via COMTEX) --One of the Toledo Zoo's newest residents is a female North Island brown kiwi chick.

The chick hatched Jan. 12 in the zoo's Avian Breeding Center (ABC), an off-exhibit facility dedicated to breeding rare and endangered birds.

Photo: Wikipedia

Eight zoos in the U.S. and 17 zoos worldwide exhibit the animals, according to Toledo Zoo officials, and few zoos outside New Zealand have successfully hatched kiwi. Through an international species survival plan, zoos worldwide are working together to preserve this species, which is endangered with decreasing populations in the wild.

The Columbus Zoo provided the Toledo Zoo with a fertilized egg in December, 2012, and aviary staff from both zoos worked together throughout the 73-day incubation. Kiwi chicks have the longest incubation period of any bird species, followed by an unusually long hatching process which often lasts several days (the zoo's kiwi chick took five days to complete hatching).

Public exhibit details have not been finalized but the chick is expected to be a part of the Wild Walkabout exhibit, scheduled to open May 24 which will feature the animals of Australia and surrounding regions.

Kiwi are nocturnal, flightless birds native to New Zealand. In the wild, kiwi were once widespread in New Zealand, but today populations are isolated and fragmented. According to information from the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN), wild kiwi populations are estimated between 25,000 and 30,000 birds, with declines of 90 percent or more over the last century.

Some kiwi characteristics seem more mammal-like than bird-like. They have a keen sense of smell (rare among birds), good hearing and whiskery feathers around their face. They are also the only bird with nostrils at the end of their beak, and females lay the largest egg of any bird in the world, in relation to their size.

http://www.menafn.com/menafn/29e5f4a1-93fa-47ec-8802-1c817e9d8f13/Rare-bird-born-at-Toledo-Zoo?src=main

Siena Heights student researching endangered bird

ADRIAN -- A small, green and yellow songbird with a distinct white ring around its eye has become an important part of Siena Heights University student Olivia Smith’s life.

Called the Saipan bridled white-eye, the native of the Mariana Islands in the northern Pacific Ocean is an endangered species thanks to the brown tree snake, introduced to Guam shortly after World War II. The bird no longer exists on Guam and is found only on three other Mariana islands.

Smith, a biology major at Siena, has been studying the bridled white-eye at the Toledo Zoo, where nine of the 24 members of the species in captivity live. The goal is to help the birds successfully reproduce and raise offspring in captivity, a safeguard in case the species goes extinct in the wild.

“What I’m focusing on is the captive (bird) conservation effort,” Smith said.

Continued:  http://www.sooeveningnews.com/article/20121029/NEWS/121029481