A baby vulture in a zoo of New York It is being fed not by another bird, but by a hand puppet, A technique used for decades to ensure that chick does not identify too much with its human caregivers.
Real vultures can neglect their young, so manual feeding is necessary to ensure baby survivalSaid the Bronx Zoo in a statement on Tuesday. But to ensure that it is not embedded in humans, the staff trains the instincts of the bird with a hand puppet designed to resemble a real vulture.
Chuck Cerbiniornithology curator of the Bronx Zoo, said in a statement: “At this stage of development, our animal care staff is feeding the chick with the puppet made by the Bronx zoo once a day and we are working to ensure that it is not printed in humans.”
Images of a feeding session show someone with the arm covered in black and a puppet that looks like the face and peak of a vulture in his handwhich is used to grab food snacks and deliver them to the mouth of the chick.
An adult real vulture is placed in an adjacent enclosure that “allows chick to have exposure to the appropriate behavior of a real vulture,” Cerbini said.
The zoo says that it helped to develop the food technique more than four decades ago when workers used to raise three Andean Condor chicks, which were later released in nature in Peru. The upbringing with hand puppets has also been used to help recover the critically threatened Cóndor de California.
The new royal vulture chick, which has not yet been named, is the first of its species that was born in the Bronx Zoo since the 1990s. The zoo says that he wants to make sure that the genetics of the father of chick, 55 years of age, continue, since he only has another living breeding.