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Questionable Practices at the Calgary Zoo

Critter News

Another animal dies at the Calgary Zoo and more questions are being raised about their practices. I don't track zoos, but this seems like an unusually high number of casualties. In April 2009, unseasonably cold weather froze two whopping crane eggs. They were a part of the zoo’s breeding program for the rare birds.

Zoos 100
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Angry Birds, What’s Black and White and Hungry All Over, and a Little Something for the Ladies: This Week in Bird News

10,000 Birds

Scientists ponder the feasibility of genetically engineering chickens to lay the eggs of endangered bird species. The law of unintended consequences has tragic effects at a zoo in England, as rat poison ends up killing the Rainbow Lorikeets it was intended to protect. So crazy it just might work?

Penguins 100
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Come@Me: Don’t Mourn for Extinct Birds

10,000 Birds

Pink Pigeons were featured on episode four of the second season of The Zoo , the excellent television series about The Bronx Zoo,* and their story was disturbing. This description appears to be an overstatement though, because we learn by the end of the episode that The Stud and Serendipity have not produced one viable egg.

Mauritius 101
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What the Owl Knows: The New Science of the World’s Most Enigmatic Birds: A Book Review

10,000 Birds

What the Owl Knows is organized into nine chapters: introduction, adaptation (including vision and flight), research and researchers, vocalization, courtship and breeding, roosting and migration, cognition, and two chapters on owls and humans–captive owls (not zoos, educational owls) and owls in our cultural history.

Owls 203
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15 Australian Birds (Episode 4)

10,000 Birds

It seems that quite a few zoos keep Tawny Frogmouths. When these birds breed, this can lead to highly cringeworthy announcements, for example from Adelaide Zoo : “We have egg-citing news!” If I was so inclined, I might think that they deserve to be killed by Pied Currawongs for their sinful behavior.

Birds 220
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The Passenger Pigeon & A Message From Martha: One Pigeon, Two Book Reviews

10,000 Birds

We have photographs and newspaper obituaries of Martha, the last living Passenger Pigeon, who died after a lifetime in captivity, mostly in the Cincinnati Zoo. Fuller has not preached about the evils of the human practices that killed and dislocated the Passenger Pigeon; he hasn’t moaned and groaned or sentimentalized.

2014 159
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When conservation and animal rights collide

10,000 Birds

Each year tens of thousands of these gulls go to the islands and each pair will lay three eggs. Most of these clutches of eggs will hatch to produce three fluffy and adorable chicks. By way of an example take the Western Gulls that I studied on the Farallon Islands in California.