You bend over to get a closer look at the tiny 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.
And then it hits you: Despite appearances, the bird you see is one of the rarest in the world. Beautiful or not, a Guam Micronesian kingfisher chick is a sight to behold, and it's becoming a common sight at the Hope B. McCormick Bird House, which in recent years has had great success producing these highly endangered birds.
As recently as 2004 only 59 kingfishers remained in the world–and all lived in
captivity. Today that number of captive kingfishers hovers around 100, seven of which live at Lincoln Park Zoo. "The population stayed in the 60’s for quite some time," says Bird House Lead Keeper Nicole. "Then within the last couple of years we have seen a significant increase in breeding success within the program."
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 kingfishers, 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 program.
Lincoln Park Zoo’s current breeding pair has produced several chicks for the past three years prompted by breeding recommendations made by the Micronesian Kingfisher Species Survival Plan. (Because the female was an inexperienced mom in the early years, all but one of the chicks was hand-reared by birdhouse keepers. For the second and third years, one chick from each year was parent-reared with some assistance from keepers.)
Chicks, like the one that hatched at the zoo in June, are fed by the parents and keepers until about day 50, at which point they are able to self-feed. By this time they've lost the grayish-brown pinfeathers and bear the colors of mature kingfishers: upper feathers of iridescent greenish-blue, buff underparts and cinnamon-colored caps.
"A male and a female from North American zoos were sent to Guam in 2004 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. But seeing some of those hatchlings eventually released in their native habitat would indeed be a beautiful thing.
