Abstract
The rains came and the flooding followed with a vengeance. Just try ing to reach home took blind faith. Blind because the sky opens up and big tepid drops come with the intensi- ty of a waterfall. Faith because I was still hoping the small coral road across the rice paddy to my house remained intact. I could not tell where one side of the road was as it was now the edge of a new waterfall as it dropped into the next paddy. Just a few days earlier I had gone over the edge of the road with my car. Within a matter of minutes 10 of my quarantine station workers were off in a tmck to solve my trans-port problems with smiles on their faces and happy hearts at the chance to take a break from endless vegetable/fruit chopping and cage cleaning. With the rains came even more power outages than normal.
This scenario could be considered one of the normal days in the tropics.The difference for us was that we had baby birds in the nest box. I had a container load of brooders, incubators, inverters, 12 volts systems, etc. coming down from the States hut it wasn't here yet. I wanted to pull the babies and if I had had my equipment I would have pulled eggs to incubate. But there were no incubators and no dependable power supply.
The babies were two Umbrella Cockatoo chicks. So nothing new, you say. But for here, these were the first captive bred cockatoos ever to hatch in Indonesia. Three weeks after the hatch we pulled two nice babies from the nest box. Four government officials from the Department of Wildlife watched.They had come to record the handing of the chicks. The Department of Wildlife gathered around as we
slipped closed AFA bands on the chicks legs. The men showed happiness and hope on their faces and pride in their voices. I watched and listened to them talk of the future and whether or not we would try to breed this or that species of bird that the Wildlife Department was concerned about regarding survival in the wild. I began to see the two little chicks in a new light.
For American breeders, perhaps the hatching of a couple of Umbrella chicks seems insignificant. But for the country of Indonesia this was a very small but important step towards education, conservation and preservation of their native wildlife.· Two weeks later, the Governor of Bali greeted the chicks and again asked us to work on captive breeding programs for some of the native Bali birds that he is concerned about.
Perhaps I should start at the beginning and introduce ourselves. We are the Bali Bird Park.We are located on the island of Bali in the country of Indonesia. At this time there are 300 workers building the Bird Park with the intention of opening during September 1995. The Park will he very small hut very beautiful. We have nowhere near the 500 or more cages offered by some bird parks, hut we do have the lush tropical setting and a variety of exotic tropical birds you will never see outside of Indonesia. Though the Park is small, the breeding unit is not. With the approval of the President of Indonesia and the cooperation of both the government's Department of Wildlife and its Department of Forestry, we have set about to establish a captive breeding program for rare and endangered Indonesian birds. The Birds coming to the Park are not birds we take out of the wild hut rather a combination of old pets that we bought, birds kept illegally that were confiscated by the government and given to us, and birds coming from various zoos.
Our quarantine station is about an hour away from the Park and was built first. The initial birds brought in were not rare ones hut old pets. We had a staff to train and a lot to learn ourselves in what health problems we would confront. When we received these birds their previous diet had been corn on the cob and water. Typically, they had been chained to a perch all their captive lives.