Oregon Zoo keeper rescues a hatching California condor chick from its less-than-perfect papa

Published: Friday, March 30, 2012, 3:36 PM     Updated: Monday, April 02, 2012, 10:28 AM
condor2.JPGHatching season nearly always involves some drama at the Oregon Zoo's captive breeding center in Clackamas County. This week was no exception.
In maternity wards the world over, expectant fathers pace, which is no big deal if you're an average guy, but a crazy bad move if you're a California condor.

Keepers at the Oregon Zoo's condor breeding center, watching a live video feed this week, were horrified to see an excited condor father walking laps around his sand-filled nest box, gently rolling an egg ahead of him, as if it was a soccer ball.

The chick inside was already mid-hatch, beak poking through the gray-green shell and vocalizing loudly.

At that stage, either mother or dad should have been serving as midwife, warming the egg with body heat and helping pull bits of eggshell away to ease the chick's entrance into the avian world.

Keepers knew they had to act swiftly or the chick, whose highly endangered species depends on new blood to survive, wouldn't make it.

This particular chick -- the second among perhaps five that will hatch this season at the zoo's center -- had a sketchy go of it from Day 1.

After it was laid Feb. 2 and transferred to an incubator, keepers spotted a small hole in the egg. Without a fix, the developing chick would die.

Kelli Walker, lead keeper, employed an old condor-caretaker trick: She doused the hole with sterile solution and antiseptic, then smeared glue over the hole.

The fix worked and the chick growing in the fist-sized egg developed nicely.

Following common practice, keepers had replaced it in the nest with a dummy egg, fooling the parents into thinking they were doing their job incubating.

Late Tuesday morning, as the chick began the 36- to 72-hour hatch process, keepers removed the dummy egg from the nest, replacing it with the real deal.

kelli1.JPGView full sizeIn this photo from May 2011, Kelli Walker, the Oregon Zoo's lead California condor keeper, assists a chick that had trouble hatching on its own. She had to step in to help with another hatch this week.
Everything went smoothly, Walker says, until Wednesday, when she spotted the fatherly missteps.

She raced to the drafty barn where 42 of the enormous birds live at the Jonsson Center for Wildlife Conservation in rural Clackamas County, a site off-limits to the public. Walker tried to flush the father out of the dimly lit nest box into his netted pen.

He wouldn't budge.

Walker kept at it and finally, shortly before 2:30 p.m., the father left the nest. The keeper reached in, grabbed the hatching egg and replaced it again with a dummy.

The real egg's membrane looked dry -- bad news. Without moisture, chicks can't rotate the nearly 360 degrees they need to before pecking through shell and breaking the top off the egg.

Walker placed the egg on a cushion in a portable incubator, headed to the on-site veterinary clinic and went to work with the sort of low-tech tools that in the right hands can save an endangered species: a sterile swab moistened with ophthalmic solution, or artificial tears.

If Walker wasn't careful, she might kill the chick.

She turned up the clinic's thermostat and moved the egg from the incubator to a heating pad.

Ever-so-delicately, she swiped the damp swab across the membrane, avoiding the chick's feathers. Satisfied it was moist enough, she covered the hatch hole, known as the pip site, with a sterile drape, cut a small breathing hole in the drape and returned the chick to the incubator.

Mitch Finnegan, the zoo's chief veterinarian, examined the hatching chick Thursday morning. Walker worked with him to remove dried membrane, clean nest sand from the egg and crack open the shell a little more, so the chick had room to move.

One small wing worked its way out.

cond.JPGView full sizeOregon Zoo staffers picked away bits of shell to help this endangered California condor chick hatch last week.
Condor breeding and rearing is most successful when parents rear their own chick, or another bird's chick. Human rearing is possible but far from ideal.

So, at 10:05 a.m., Walker returned the egg to the nest. At 12:42 p.m., it hatched completely.

The father was right there. His pacing over, he settled down to brood over his hatchling. The nest looked as calm as a sleeping infant's nursery.

Hanging around outside the nest, minding her own business, the mother bird seemed unaware that in condor land, the stork had arrived.

- Katy Muldoon; twitter.com/katymuldoon

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