Posts Tagged ‘Feeding Birds’

Jan
27

Avian Enrichment: Foraging Fun with an Eclectus Parrot

Posted by in Birds,Enrichment,Everyday Enrichment

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

Many Houston Zoo visitors often ask us what we do to ensure the health and mental well-being of our birds. Our keepers work daily to prepare varied and nutritionally-fortified diets, clean and maintain a variety of enclosures and take steps to ensure the best possible health of our animals. However, this doesn’t address every aspect of caring for our animals: this is where enrichment comes into play.

Enrichment may sound fancy or difficult, but in essence it simply entails giving our animals the opportunity to exhibit natural behaviors and reactions that they would demonstrate in the wild. Here at the Houston Zoo, our keepers work to provide a wide array of enrichment opportunities to keep our animals mentally stimulated (and we try our best to make sure our guests will be able to see these interactions as well).

Here we have an Eclectus Parrot (Eclectus roratus) working to get some mixed nuts and seed that have been placed in a tall can. Parrots in particular are known for spending large parts of their day in the wild seeking out new food sources, so giving a parrot something like this enforces a notion of working to get their food. This bird clearly employs a wide variety of problem-solving skills before she eventually wins the prize of a few peanuts and sunflower seeds.

Ever wonder what you can do to help enrich the animals at the Houston Zoo? There are many items that are highly desirable in our pursuit of providing an ever-changing life of variety for our animals, which you can view here. Of course, you can also feel free to come to the zoo to observe the variety of natural behaviors encouraged through these simple interactions. Many guests can spend hours enraptured by the most basic of natural behaviors, including simple foraging for food!

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Dec
29

Give the Gift of Grub: Feeding 800 Birds

Posted by in Birds,Feeding Our Animals

Please consider giving a year-end, tax-deductible gift of grub to help feed our animals in the coming year by clicking www.houstonzoo.org/gift-of-grub or our our CONTRIBUTE tab on Facebook!

At the Houston Zoo Bird department, we make A LOT of diets. We have over 800 birds in our collection and they need to be fed every day.

A handful of our staff are what we call “kitchen keepers.”  We have one main kitchen keeper and some substitute keepers that come in around 5 a.m. each morning to get diet ingredients for 4 out of 5 different areas within the department ready for the rest of us when we come in at 7a.m.

 

Each area will bring a tub out to their section that is full different types of food  – fruits, veggies, different kinds of pellets, a mixture of lettuces, meat, and supplemental food items, like the ones you see below:

 

We prepare over 185 diets –  80 trays and 105 bowls of food — and distribute them in the actual exhibits.

There are a few special birds that get fed differently based on the way they would eat in the wild. Some, like our Cinereous Vultures, have their food given to them as if they were coming across carrion, while Kookaburras are encouraged to fly down to the ground to “catch” their food. Our ducks on Duck Lake are given their food, in pellet form, on the ground to replicate how they would find food naturally. Then the flamingos are given a pellet that is distributed on the surface of their pool so they can eat by filter feeding.

Feeding the birds at the Houston Zoo is a lot of work but it is also a lot of fun!

By Jessica Clark, Senior Bird Keeper

How much does it cost to feed your family for a year? At the Houston Zoo, our annual grocery bill adds up to more than $600,000! With a bill that big, imagine the impact that your support could have. Your gift might help purchase these tasty treats for 800 beaks. Make your tax-deductible donation at www.houstonzoo.org/gift-of-grub or, click our our CONTRIBUTE tab on Facebook!

You can email development@houstonzoo.org for more information.

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Dec
20

Gift of Grub: Eating Like a Bird… Not!

Posted by in Behind the Scenes,Birds

Practically every guest who comes to the Houston Zoo to visit our animals has at least heard the notion of “eating like a bird.” The overwhelming majority of birds are much lighter than they initially appear because of their lightweight skeletons, air sacs throughout the body, and feathers; as such, they tend to not eat as much as a mammal of similar size would be expected to eat.

However, there is an exception to be found with every rule.

This is Darwin, our 5-year old male Double-wattled Cassowary. These birds are actually some of the largest in the world, dwarfed only by the Ostrich. They live in the rainforests of Northern Australia and Papua New Guinea where their diet mainly consists of fruit. In this video, our Cassowary is getting a small assortment of fruit including apple, orange, banana, pear, grape and cantaloupe.

However, the amount of food shown here doesn’t begin to give an idea of how much food these birds will really eat: Darwin is fed several times daily, and can easily eat 8-10lbs of fruit, greens and pellets in the course of a day!

As you can see, Darwin has absolutely no problem eating very large pieces of fruit! This trait is crucial to the survival of their native rainforests – cassowaries eat large amounts of fruit and then disperse the seeds throughout the forest (seeds have a high germination rate in the digestive tracks of these animals). This makes these animals a “Keystone Species, ” meaning that they have a disproportionate impact on their environment — in this case, a positive one.  Several species of fruit trees rely on cassowaries, and their method of seed-dispersal is used by even more. They are completely dependent on cassowaries… and their appetites.

Pretty much destroys the notion of “eating like a bird,” doesn’t it?

Written by Jack Pine, Bird Keeper

How much does it cost to feed your family for a year? At the Houston Zoo, our annual grocery bill adds up to more than $600,000! With a bill that big, imagine the impact that your support could have. Your gift might help purchase a tasty steak (or ten) for our tigers. Make your tax-deductible donation at www.houstonzoo.org/gift-of-grub. or, click our our CONTRIBUTE tab on Facebook!

You can email development@houstonzoo.org for more information.

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Dec
10

Gift of Grub: Stork Snack

Posted by in Behind the Scenes,Birds,Featured

We are doing a year-end fundraiser to help feed our animals in the coming year. You can click the contribute tab right on our Facebook Page if you’d like to give a tax-deductible donation, or click on the link at the end of this post!  This blog series will reveal just what it really takes to feed the over 6,000 animals at your Zoo…

Using Water Movement to Stimulate Hunting in our Saddlebill Storks

Having a great many carnivorous species in our collection here at the Houston Zoo, it goes without saying that we feed out previously frozen food items to our animals. In the Bird Department we utilize a number of creatures including mice, rats, rabbits, chicks and fish carcass. While we are able to provide a balanced diet to our animals to maintain their peak physical health, sometimes this isn’t enough. Nutrition isn’t the only area of concern;  many of our animals benefit from the chance to “hunt.”

These are our Saddlebill Storks (Ephippiorhynchus senegalensis) getting the chance to “hunt” a lunch of thawed fish.

We’ve found that utilizing the water movement of filling the wading pool encourages a more aggressive hunting and feeding response — instead of just eating, the birds actually have to catch their lunch.

Since most avian species spend the majority of their day seeking food in the wild, this is an ideal means of feeding these animals here in captivity. They get the nutrition from a balanced variety of fish and the mental stimulation of having to hunt their own food. All it takes is a resourceful keeper, a bit of water-pressure and a dream.

This year the Houston Zoo’s end-of-the-year fundraising campaign is called The Gift of Grub. Proceeds will help defray the costs of caring for our animals and provide everything we need to keep them healthy and happy in the coming year. You can make your tax-deductible donation at www.houstonzoo.org/gift-of-grub. or, click our our CONTRIBUTE tab on Facebook!

Email development@houstonzoo.org for more information.

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Aug
02

Growing Up Flamingo: Swimming and Feeding

Posted by 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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