Avian Enrichment: Great Blue Turaco Gets Bamboo

Feb

Posted by Jack Pine in Birds,Enrichment,Everyday Enrichment

Everyday Enrichment: Making Life More Interesting for our Avian Residents – Part IV

As a child, I absolutely hated spinach. I was not a particularly finicky eater, but spinach was the one food substance that would not be accepted under any terms. In my opinion it was slimy, smelly and altogether quite inedible. As I have grown older, I’ve found that there are a variety of ways in which spinach can be a perfectly acceptable component of my diet. Raw spinach in salads is neither slimy nor smelly; spinach baked on a pizza with chicken and red onion is barely even noticeable. The fact of the matter is that there are a wide variety of ways to provide food substances that otherwise might have been deemed unacceptable.

This is a Great Blue Turaco (Corythaeola cristata) enjoying a bit of bamboo browse. Here at the Houston Zoo, we regularly provide our animals with a variety of safe plant material to eat, use as nesting material or otherwise simply destroy. Examples of plants we use in our browse program include hibiscus, bamboo, pyracantha, banana, ginger, mulberry, hackberry and willow. Browse not only provides added supplementation to the nutrition of our animals, it also gives the birds something to do; if a bird wants to eat the new growth found on the branches, it must actually search for the new growth and figure out how to get it.

Our birds react quite favorably to this form of enrichment; it also demonstrates yet another way our keepers must continually think about the presentation of the diet to ensure it is appealing to our animals. For example, the Great Blue Turaco seen in this video enjoys Romaine Lettuce as an occasional treat. Leaves that are broken up are eaten with relish, and there is nothing more exciting than watching this bird thoroughly enjoy half a head of lettuce that is secured to an enclosure wall. However, individual leaves that are placed in the animals bowl will be picked up and thrown on the floor. Turacos are not able to hold and tear food items like other birds can because of their diet; in nature, fruits and leaves are found attached to a tree which means these birds can just bite off pieces of acceptable food material until they are food.

All these examples just demonstrate the wide variety of ways keepers must constantly assess and evaluate the dietary needs of our animals. The dietary care of our animals must provide for nutritional balance as well as mental stimulation – food would not show up in the same place daily in the wild, and our animals demonstrate a great increase in natural behavior from having to work just a little harder to get their food.

To this day, I refuse to believe that spinach that comes from a can has even the slightest properties of food. However, many of our birds at the Houston Zoo will let you know that simply changing up the presentation of a diet (turning over a new leaf, as it were) can provide our animals with a diet that is nutritionally fortified and fun!

You can visit this fabulous bird in our Birds of the World habitat. Hope to see you soon!

The Official Houston Zoo Blog