The captive population of Australia’s most unique critically endangered bird has doubled thanks to a plan hatched by Werribee open range zoo in Victoria. Last week, nine plains-wanderer chicks came into the world within 24 hours of each other. One of the clutches was hatched in an incubator and raised under the paternal care of a feather duster after one of the fathers, a four-month-old who was daunted at raising his first chicks, stopped sitting on them.
Within four days, the zoo director Glen Holland said, the chicks were eating crickets ‘the size of beans’ and zooming around their enclosure ‘like bumblebees’.
‘They have been snuggling up to the feather duster, pushing up into the feathers,’ Holland said.
