When Feeding Is Also Puppeteering

A few decades ago, William G. Conway — the late ornithologist who’s largely responsible for reimagining the Bronx Zoo as the conservation-minded institution we know today — had his upper lip bitten halfway off by a king vulture. Apparently, however, it didn’t put anyone there off the vulture business because the zoo has gone to significant lengths to breed a new one. Hatched on February 25, this tiny as-yet-unnamed creature in the fluffy white feather shrug looks fully prepared for the Raptor Met Gala. He or she — nobody’s sure till a DNA test is done — is the offspring of two birds who were fixed up on their first date here in the Bronx. The father is 55 years old and arrived at the zoo in 2018; the mother, who arrived not too long after she was hatched, is about 20. King vultures are monogamous, explains Chuck Cerbini, the zoo’s curator of ornithology, “so compatibility of the pairing is vital for successful nesting.”

In order for the chick to have normal bird relationships later in life, the curators do not want it to get the idea that a human is its parent. That is tricky when people are the ones doing the feeding, as they are here, to avoid any risk of maternal neglect. (Another adult king vulture is housed next to the baby, “for socialization,” says Cerbini. But she’s “not an experienced mother,” he adds, and therefore “would be unlikely to display any maternal behavior toward another pair’s offspring.”) Over the years, several institutions, including this one, have figured out a peculiar but effective solution to that conundrum: A zookeeper does the feeding with a hand puppet that looks like an adult bird. (The same technique has helped bring back the California condor, if only barely, from the edge of extinction.) Fortunately, the Bronx Zoo has artists on staff, employed to make the habitats lifelike, and one of them, Carolyn Fuchs, went all out on this particular project, taking special pains to get the puppet’s proportions and colors right. Once a day, a faux vulture brings the real vulture a few morsels of dead rodent. If all that feeding goes well, that fluffball will get a lot bigger and be around for a long time. Adult king vultures can have a six-and-a-half-foot wingspan, and the oldest known one is nearly 73 and still going.