Captive population of critically endangered bird doubles with the birth of nine chicks

This article is more than 1 year old

This article is more than 1 year old

The captive population of Australia’s most unique critically endangered bird has doubled with the birth of nine plains-wanderer chicks, helped out by a feather duster, a heat lamp and a lot of cotton wool.

The chicks were born to two pairs and hatched within 24 hours of each other at Werribee open range zoo in Victoria last week.

Within four days, the zoo director Glen Holland said, the chicks were eating crickets “the size of beans” and zooming around their enclosure “like bumblebees”.

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“Once they are hatched and warm and dry they run off and fend for themselves – they are very independent,” Holland said.

One of the clutches was hatched in an incubator and raised under the paternal care of a feather duster after one of the fathers, a four-month-old who was daunted at raising his first chicks, stopped sitting on them.

Like emus, male plains-wanderers bear responsibility for child rearing and stay with the chicks, while the female can move on to another mate soon after laying her eggs.

“They have been snuggling up to the feather duster, pushing up into the feathers,” Holland said.

The new hatchlings bring the zoo’s captive population to 20. It’s only the second time the zoo has successfully hatched plains-wanderer chicks since beginning a $500,000 captive breeding program 18 months ago.

“Breeding nine healthy chicks in such a short time is a huge achievement and one we are all very excited about,” the threatened species keeper, Yvette Pauligk, said.

“Genetically speaking, they are listed as the fourth most important species worldwide, and the … most important in Australia in evolutionary distinctiveness and extinction risk.

“To lose such an ancient, unique species would be completely devastating.”

The plains-wanderer, Pedionomus torquatus, is a ground-dwelling bird that lives in a particular type of dry grassland in western Victoria, New South Wales and eastern South Australia. It is the only member of the Pedionomidae family.

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There are fewer than 1,000 mature birds left in the wild. Grazing and persistent drought are rapidly shrinking their preferred habitat of semi-open grassland, although farmers in key habitat areas have joined with conservationists to ensure they maintain precisely the right grass levels – not too bare and not too thick – for the fussy birds.

The adults in the breeding program are a mixture of wild eggs that were collected and a few geographically confused birds who have turned up in unwise places: a carpark in Bacchus Marsh, a backyard in Bendigo and a suburban area of Craigieburn.

“I would not say they are particularly clever in their habits,” Holland said.

The bird’s genetic isolation has presented a challenge for keepers, who are unable to look at a closely related species to model the best methods for captive breeding. The closest allegory – although they are not closely related – seems to be the buttonquail.

“It’s a case of: let’s just base the breeding on buttonquails and see how we go,” Holland said.

“We have got about five years of really serious learning about the captive side of things, and then if it continues as well as it has this year, we are talking seriously about putting birds back in the wild, in about five or six years.”