Aviculture at Tulsa Zoo Part II – Evolving Towards a Modern Collection

Abstract

The first inventory of the Tulsa Zoo bird collection I have been able to locate documents that on Christmas day, 1969, 281 birds of 67 forms (representing 20 families) were present (Tulsa Zoological Society, 1970). Sixty-three were domestic ducks and 27 were domestic geese. The anatid collection otherwise consisted of ten Mute Swans, one Black-bellied Whistling Duck, two Mandarin Ducks and eight Wood ducks. On the other hand, psittacines were comparatively well represented, with 62 specimens of nineteen taxa. Twenty-two of them were Budgies, but there were also fourteen amazons of seven taxa (including six Yellow-napes). There were twelve taxa of falconiform birds of prey, represented by 19 specimens.

While the only non-passeriform softbill on Christmas Day, 1969 was a Cuvier's Toucan (Ramphastos tucanus cuvieri) (then widespread in US zoos, in those days before Newcastle's quarantines and Ecuador's export restrictions), there were 22 passerines of nine taxa. As might be expected twelve were estrildid finches of four species, and the most well-represented taxon was the Hill Mynah, with six specimens. Almost every zoo and zoo-related collection had Hill Mynahs back then, and they could be seen in practically every pet shop. No concerted effort was made to breed them, however, and when commercial imports ended in 1997, following its listing on CITES Appendix II, this species soon reached its current level of scarcity in US zoos. (As of October, 2014, only four US zoos holding Hill Mynahs were listed by the ZIMS inventory system.)

On June 30, 1979, there were 69 taxa ofbirds, only three more than December 25, 1969, and with the transfer from the collection of the Budgies and domestic waterfowl, among others, the number of specimens had decreased to 230. The number of psittacine species had dropped from nineteen to six. However, the representation of families had grown from 20 to 35 (Tulsa Park and Recreation Department, 1979), including mousebirds, frogmouths, seriemas, tinamous, woodpeckers, lapwings, and other birds not exhibited before the late '70's at Tulsa Zoo. This very much reflects the trend across the US, as zoos responded to the challenge of the sudden restriction of foreign bird availability as a result of the 1972 Exotic Newcastle's Disease quarantine requirements, with an unprecedented effort to create populations of captive-bred birds that had hardly ever been propagated in American zoos before.

 From my perusal of Tulsa Zoo's computerized records, I found the entire avian propagation for 1969 was two Ring-necked Doves (Streptopelia capicola) (which I suppose were Barbary Doves [Streptopelia risoria]). In 1970, eight doves were hatched. In 1971 two Ring-necked Doves, one white Barbary Dove and five ostriches hatched. In 1972, the year the Newcastle's import ban went into effect, the total was one white Barbary Dove.

From 1973 through 1978, no more than four species were hatched in a given year, and the total number of species hatched in that six year interval was eight. This figure did include three Victoria Crowned Pigeons (from a pair purchased from the legendary California aviculturist J. W. Steinbeck in 1973), eight Peach-faced Lovebirds, four Military Macaws, sixteen Barn Owls (seven released to the wild), and ten Gouldian Finches.

In 1979 nine species of birds were bred that year alone. That figure jumped to fourteen in 1980. In 1981, it reached seventeen, which has so far remained Tulsa Zoo's all time high for the number of species hatched here in one year (Table I).

Two of the species that stand out for numbers hatched in 1981 were inhabitants of the Southwestern Desert, one of the four buildings that made up the Robert J. Lafortune North American Living Museum (Zucconi, 1979, Zucconi & Nicholson, 1981). From its opening in 1978 until its remodeling and re-dedication as the Robert J. Lafortune Wildlife Trek in 2013, this award-winning exhibit housed a remarkable collection of North American animals, and achieved an impressive...