Twelve days until Christmas!

Christmas is around the corner and we have 37 chicks in our nests around the Tambopata Research Center. Mark M, our macaw breeding expert, is working hard to keep our six foster chicks alive and thriving in our nursery. Three of them are still less than a week old and need feedings every three hours. If it all goes well, hopefully by Christmas day most of them will be back in nests being fed by their foster parents and learning the ways of the world.

 

Happy holidays from our six foster chicks this season. First row: Chris. Second row, from left to right: Parker, Aggie, Mary Poppins, Mark, Henry.

You'll be happy to hear that the first 'third' chick of the season from nest Mandy Lu was returned to her nest on the 11th of December. We went back later that day to assess whether the nesting parents had fed her. The best way to do this is to check her crop for food as it shows she is being fed and that her begging response is effective. It was concerning to find that in the first day her crop was quite empty. Just before we started feeding her supplemental food she let loose and the stool showed that she had in fact been fed something during the day – there was still hope! The next afternoon the crew went back to check on her again and, low and behold, her weight had increased and crop was full of seeds and fruits from the jungle. So far the first relocation this season has been a success with Indy accepted back into her nest, full of food and doing well.

Our "spider monkey chick", Parker, is also doing much better. He is the only fourth chick that has ever survived this long during all our years of research. Although still small, he is feeding a lot and making up for those early days when he wasn’t digesting much. At just four days old, the temperature in the jungle dropped dramatically overnight causing the temperature in the brooder to drop two degrees Fahrenheit. It was extremely lucky he wasn’t in the nest otherwise he would have died for sure. For larger chicks, this temperature change wouldn’t have been a problem but for a four day old chick it caused the movement of food through the digestive system to slow down. Thankfully, our specialist knew exactly how to fix the problem and made Parker a special formula which got things moving again. This is why we are asking for another battery and solar system for our brooders. The system we have now is operated by a car battery and is not 100% reliable. We need to prevent even the smallest change in temperature to ensure these high risk chicks are kept in a completely stable environment.  

 

Parker (17 days old) our first "fourth chick" to survive that far. He was born underweight and had major digestive issues due to drops in temperature at night. We hope to raise extra funds in our campaign so we can add our brooders to our solar systems so that this dropping temperature issue will not happen again.

If you can, please share this with your friends and colleagues. It might only take a few more people to see this project in the next 9 days and we could get a whole new solar system before the campaign finishes. It would be a pretty amazing gift for the festive season, that’s for sure.

With six other chicks at the center and new chicks hatching every day it’s a busy road ahead. We will continue to keep you up to date with how the foster chicks are doing, what happens when we put them in their new nests, as well as any other developments here at the Tambopata Research Center.

Thank you again for all you have done and continue to do.

Happy holidays,

The Tambopata Macaw Project