(24 Jul 2025)
RESTRICTION SUMMARY:
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Prague – 24 July 2025
1. Zookeepers feeding the baby vulture using a puppet
2. Close of chick waiting for feeding
3. Various shots of the chick being fed
4. SOUNDBITE (Czech) Antonin Vaidl, Bird keeper:
"We feed using the puppet to eliminate the imprinting (dependence) on humans and try to use the most natural method of raising a chick whose owns parents have not claimed it."
5. Various of the chick being fed by the puppet
6. SOUNDBITE (Czech) Antonin Vaidl, Bird keeper:
"By the time the chick started hatching, we wanted to put an egg in there, but suddenly, one dummy egg was gone that day, and the birds weren’t sitting (on the nest) well. They returned later, but it was very risky to put the chick in the nest at that time."
7. Various of the chick being fed using the puppet
8. Various shots of one of the parents of the vulture chick
9. Mid of the chick being fed
STORYLINE:
Zookeepers in Prague know they need to turn into puppeteers to save newly born birds unwanted by their parents.
A lesser yellow-headed vulture that hatched three weeks ago is one of them.
Bird keeper Antonín Vaidl said Thursday after a dummy egg disappeared from the nest shortly before that, it was a signal for the keepers that the parents were not ready to take care of their two babies, although they did it well before in 2022 and 2023.
The one born first is being kept in a box and fed using a puppet that imitates a parent bird.
Another one is expected to be born in the next few days.
Vaidl said the puppet is needed to make sure the bird will be capable of breeding, which it won’t be if it gets used to people.
“We feed using the puppet to eliminate the imprinting (dependence) on humans and try to use the most natural method of raising a chick", Vaidl said
He said the puppet doesn’t have to be a perfect imitation of an adult bird because the baby responds to certain signals, such as a pale orange coloration on the featherless head and neck in this case.
Lesser yellow-headed vultures live in the wild in Latin America and Mexico.
Prague Zoo is one of only three zoos in Europe that breed them.
In the past, the park successfully applied such treatment to save the critically endangered Javan green magpie and two chicks of the rhinoceros hornbill..
The puppet feeding is applicable for birds that live in pairs.
AP video by Stanislav Hodina.
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