A rare bird born at the Cincinnati Zoo could soon find a new home in the wild. The chick is a sihek — also known as the Guam kingfisher — and it could be one of a handful born at various zoos to be released on an atoll in the Pacific Ocean.
Until 2024, the birds had been considered extinct in the wild for 40 years.
"Being able to bring those numbers back, and being on the ground floor and actually contributing quite a bit to that process, I think is fantastic," Cody Sowers, head keeper of the zoo's Bird Team, tells WVXU. "A lot of times zoos like to talk about doing the conservation work, but we're really doing it, and I think that's awesome."
Following a quarantine period in a secure facility at Disney's Animal Kingdom in Florida, the birds will be transferred to Palmyra Atoll about 1,000 miles south of Honolulu, Hawaiʻi. There they'll join a handful of others released in 2024, including three from the Cincinnati Zoo. One of those three laid its first egg on the atoll last year.
Once they're released, scientists will continue to study the population.
"There's a lot of monitoring that goes on, as you can imagine, and a lot of observations, just seeing where the birds are going," Sowers says. "They do a lot of tracking with little radio frequency identification tags."
Ten sihek chicks raised as part of an international collaboration known as the Sihek Recovery Program are considered candidates for release. The program will decide which of them will be re-homed. All are considered candidates for wild release, according to a release, and as many as eight could be selected.
Sowers says the first nine birds released in 2024 are still doing well, though none have successfully hatched eggs and reared offspring.
"They're thriving. They're living their best lives," he says.
The birds are native to the island of Guam and were nearly wiped out by an invasive brown tree snake introduced accidentally by ships in the 1940s. Twenty-nine birds were captured in the 1980s and taken to zoos across the United States where a species survival plan was created in an attempt to save the species.
The zoos created a genetic database and began growing the captive population. Palmyra Atoll was chosen to be home to the reintroduced wild population. Guam remains an unsuitable habitat for reintroduction because the brown tree snake population is so high. Only two native forest species remain on Guam, according to scientists in 2021.
The atoll is largely free of predators and is fully protected as part of several nature preserves, and by the Pacific Islands Heritage Marine National Monument, one of the largest swaths of ocean and islands protected in the world, according to the zoo.
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