Blog Archive

It's been a very rewarding day today, and it started at about 6am this morning. We have been quarantining eight endangered Regent Honeyeaters in the Animal Health Centre. Regent Honeyeaters are extinct in South Australia and it is thought that there is only about 800 - 2000 individuals left in the wild.

We have been quarantining the honeyeaters in the health centre before sending them to Taronga Zoo to be released into the wild as a large group. During their quarantine period they were isolated from other birds, given a full health examination, checked for internal and external parasites and surgically sexed. Regent honeyeaters are monomorphic, which means that both male and females look very similar. So all eight birds were anaesthestised and a scope was used to visualise their reproductive organs, so if it was a female an ovary could be seen, and if it was a male a testicle could be seen. This procedure is called surgical sexing, and it was determined that we had a sex ratio of five males and three females, which in the zoo world we record as 5.3.   

Today is the day for us to send them to Taronga to be held for a short period of time before they are to be released along the eastern coast. They had to have their final examination, be boxed, and taken to the airport by 7.30am, so Dave the vet, Brett the bird keeper and myself had a very early start. First I had to trap the honeyeaters by placing a bowl of nectar into a small catch cage, I then attached a piece of string onto the cage door and stood just out of sight. Once a couple of birds entered the cage I closed the door. This method of catching for honeyeaters is generally very quick and safer than netting them.

Once caught they had their final health check and were placed individually into transporting boxes. All birds were in excellent body condition but most had mild to moderate feather loss and bruising to the top of their heads. We suspect this occurred during the Clipsal 500 V8 races, we had F18 Hornet flyover's during the weekend. Some of these were very close to the zoo and the sonic boom that follows them probably caused some commotion, and may startled the birds causing them to fly upwards, hitting their heads on the enclosure roof. All birds were behaving and flying normally in the holding aviary and were determined by our vet to be fine to travel.

It was very exciting to see these birds departing for the airport, knowing that they are destined to be released into the wild, and that I played a very small part in hopefully saving this charismatic bird from extinction. 
 
Paula