The Hadada Ibis Bostrychia hagedassh

Abstract

Ringo, John, Paul, and George are crossing a field full of sleeping Blue Meanies. Suddenly, a giant mechanical down, head spinning like a top, emits horrible screeching noises and all chaos breaks loose.

That scene from "Yellow Submarine" came to mind after my participation in Hadada Ibis nest inspections in Disney's Animal Kingdom's Pangani Forest Aviary. There is a fairly routine set of consequences resulting from such procedures. The female, sitting on her eggs, protests with an explosive, ringing "YAH! ! !" She is answered, identically, and in very short order, by the male, who, wherever he may be in this 6,600 square foot exhibit, comes swooping to her aid. There is a definite air of accusation in their dual yelling - an audial pointing finger, as it were, producing involuntary feelings of embarrassment and guilt.

These unignorable sounds have earned this bird its common name. They yell in their evening roosts, they yell when they leave them to forage for insects and worms each morning, and they yell when they fly from one feeding ground to another (Hancock, et al, 1992). Frederick Jackson, tum of the century Governor of Uganda, and an early leading authority on the birds of East Africa, likened those calls to the "hideous cackling of a witch" (Hancock, et al, 1992). In their roosts, where dozens may gather, "one bird starts calling, followed immediately by the others, and in large roosts several groups may call simultaneously" (Matheu & de! Hoya, 1992). With so conspicuous a voice, coupled with a range encompassing most of subSaharan Africa, it is not surprising that the Hadada Ibis was one of the earliest African birds to receive a scientific description, being described by the great British ornithologist Latham in 1790 from a bird collected at the Cape of Good Hope (Hancock, et al, 1992).

Despite its distribution over the greater part of the African Continent, this bird appears to have little captive history prior to the 1970s, in marked contrast to the other widespread African Ibis, the Sacred, Tbresleiornis aetbiopicus. Although vast African territories were held by Germany, Britain, and France before the First World War, I am unaware of any specimens in these countries' zoos in that age of Imperialism. The only pre-World War II record I know of is a single specimen received by the Amsterdam Zoo in 1888 (Brouwer et al 1994).

Zoologischer Garten Berlin did receive at least one in 1965, and it lived there 16 years (Brouwer et al, 1994). The first captive breeding, however, did not occur until 1974, when one was hatched and raised at Vogelpark Walsrode, the incomparably encyclopedic German bird park (Zoological Society of London, 1976).

The second collection to raise Hadadas was the Chicago Zoological Garden (Brookfield Zoo), where two hatched and one was reared in 1978 (Zoological Society of London, 1980). The Brookfield Zoo went on to raise six more, out of 11 hatched, from 1979 through 1981 (Zoological Society of London, 1981 -84). No further U.S. hatchings occurred until 1987, when the San Diego Wild Animal Park hatched three, and raised two. From 1988 through 1991, the Park bred a further 18 of which 12 were fully reared.

The Wild Animal Park hatchings are listed by the International Zoo Yearbook as the nilotica subspecies (Zoological Society of London, 1990 - 93). According to the same reference, the 17 Hadada Ibises raised, out of 45 hatched from 1988 through 1996, at the Franklin Park Zoo in Boston were B. bagedasb brevirostris. This subspecies occurs in a vast sweep from Mauritania south to the mouth of the Congo River, on the Atlantic coast of Africa, to Somalia south to Mozambique, on the Indian Ocean coast. The range of B. h. nilitoca borders the central portion of this expanse to the north, comprising portions of Ethiopia, the Sudan, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, all of Uganda, and Western Tanzania. The remaining part of Tanzania is home to B. h. brevirostris. Since Tanzania was a major source of zoo birds in the 1980s, it is not surprising, if unfortunate, that both should be represented in U.S. collections.

While these northern subspecies differ from the nominate Southern African in color, both having brownish (instead of grayish) heads and necks, as well as more pronounced and extensive iridescent green and purple patches on the wing (Hancock et al, 1992) they differ from each other in measurements. B. h. brevirostris, as one might gather from its subspecific name, possesses a shorter beak than B. h. nilotica. However, its beak is longer than that of B. h. hagedash. On an average, B. h. brevirostriss beak is about a centimeter longer than B. h. hagedash's but about two centimeters shorter than B. h. nilotica's (Hancock et al, 1992). B. h. nilotica is correspondingly a bigger bird, sometimes significantly so.

Aside from the San Diego Wild Animal Park and Franklin Park, out of the eight U.S. institutions listed by the International Zoo Yearbook as having bred Hadada Ibises through 1996, only Sea World of Florida is specified by that source to have bred...