Gryph and Laurel are parents! The Cincinnati Zoo & Botanical Garden announced Friday that their egg hatched, breaking a 30-year dry spell in Andean condor breeding at the zoo.
“The chick, a female, is about six weeks old and appears to be growing at a normal rate,” said Kim Klosterman, senior aviculture keeper. "It’s difficult to get a good look inside the nest box, but we know that the food we put in there has been disappearing quickly."
The chick is only the 14th to hatch in North American institutions in the past decade. Klosterman explained that Andean condors are a slow-breeding species whose chicks remain in the nest and depend on both parents until they're about 6 months old.
Gryph and Laurel are both 34 years old. They've laid an egg each year since 2008, but this is the first to ever hatch.
Rare Andean condor hatched @CincinnatiZoo! #BirdsAreAwesome https://t.co/1Yg1qAZoBw pic.twitter.com/MdUEHx0400
— Cincinnati Zoo (@CincinnatiZoo) July 29, 2016
Zoo officials said a new nesting chamber installed in 2014 may have helped. The 300-pound box, built by volunteers, was designed to provide a more secure, cave-in-a-cliff-like environment for the birds.
Klosterman said she was able to pull the chick for a quick exam last week. The new chick appears to be about the size of a small chicken, but she may eventually grow to be 4 feet tall and weigh as much as 33 pounds with a wingspan of 10.5 feet.
Andean condors, the largest flying land bird in the Western Hemisphere, are listed as endangered by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and threatened by the International Union for Conservation of Nature.
“When they reproduce, that tells me that we are doing something right. That’s the gauge of success,” Klosterman said.
The fate of the new chick lies in the hands of the Association of Zoos & Aquariums’ species survival plan. She will remain in the Cincinnati Zoo's condor exhibit with her parents until the association decides to send her to another facility for breeding, or to Cincinnati Zoo’s off-site facility to be conditioned for release into the wild.
