Prague, June 10 (CTK) – The Prague Zoo has raised two offspring of the rare palm cockatoo, a success that no other European zoo has achieved in the past three years, the zoo’s spokeswoman Jana Ondrejchova has told CTK.
Both the one-year-old male and nine-month-old female have overcome a critical period when their survival was uncertain.
The first young palm cockatoo hatched in the Prague zoo in 2013, but it died of a congenital kidney defect after three months.
To raise the two young parrots born in 2014, the zoo experts gathered and used information and experience from foreign zoological gardens, private breeders in Germany, Indonesia and South Africa, and from the Loro Parque parrot park in Tenerife,” expert Antonin Vaidl said.
Based on the information, the zoo launched a demanding regime of feeding the young once in 1.5 hours all day round, he said.
Vaidl’s colleague Pavlina Stepanovska said the two cockatoo offspring are each of a different nature.
The male is fearful, reacts to all impulses by crying and trying to hide. The female, for her part, is curious, sociable, active and calm.
The Palm cockatoo is an internationally strictly protected species. It is banned to catch them in the wild.
The Prague zoo has kept palm cockatoos since 2008 when it gained them within consignment seized from smugglers.
