PITTSBURGH — The tan and white Guam kingfisher perches quietly on a branch at the top of a tree, watching visitors walk past her exhibit at the National Aviary.
She’s smaller than a blue jay, and there’s nothing eye-catching about her appearance and demeanor. But she’s arguably one of the most special birds at the facility: There are only 148 Guam kingfishers known in the entire world, all of them living in zoos, aviaries or in a protected breeding facility on Guam. They are extinct in the wild.
Born May 22, she’s the first Guam kingfisher bred and hatched at the National Aviary. A second chick was hatched there July 10, to a different male and female.
Both chicks are full-size, but both still have juvenile feathers, including white breast feathers. The staff believes the younger chick is a male, and that would be confirmed if the adult breast feathers are cinnamon-colored.
The chicks have not been given names.
In two to three weeks the second chick is expected to join the female in her exhibit in The Canary’s Call section of the aviary. It’s next door to the popular interactive exhibit filled with brightly colored lorikeets that chatter loudly while perching on the shoulders of visitors who feed them.
In the wild, Guam kingfishers are not too active, so at zoos they don’t need a big exhibit, said Kurt Hundgen, an ornithologist who is director of animal collections at the aviary. He is also vice chair of the Association of Zoos and Aquariums’ Guam Kingfisher Species Survival Plan.
In addition to doing a lot of roosting, the birds “are tough and aggressive with other birds,” Hundgen said, so they can’t be placed in the big rooms where many species co-exist and fly freely. The female chick lives up in the exhibit tree tops and currently shares her space with a brightly colored juvenile hooded pitta — a ground-dwelling bird.
Despite their name, Guam kingfishers don’t catch and eat fish. In the wild they eat live prey, including geckos, crabs and flying insects. They do not eat seeds, nuts or berries.
At the aviary they eat dead lizards and live meal worms, wax worms and crickets.
In 1984, the Guam Department of Agriculture took the unprecedented step of capturing the last kingfishers — 29 of them — and shipping them to U.S. zoos for supervised breeding programs.
The Guam kingfishers and another bird, the Guam rail, were virtually eliminated by brown tree snakes that were accidentally introduced to the island in the late 1940s and early 1950s. It is thought the snakes arrived on ships. Nine species of birds, native to Guam, were eliminated by the snakes.
Brown tree snakes have no natural predators on Guam, and their population has swelled to an estimated 1 million to 2 million, Hundgen said.
Guam officials are interested in getting the kingfishers back, but that can’t happen until the snakes are eliminated, Hundgen said. Efforts are underway to do that by capturing and killing them, while the AZA and conservationists work to save Guam kingfishers and other species.
