Red billed Currasow

This Endangered bird is one of the more beautiful curassows. It belongs to the Crax genus of Curassows which are all very similar, but the male of each species has different coloured wattles. The red billed curassow is one of two species that have red wattles, the other being the wattled, which it differs from by not having deep red wattles (they are more orange/red) and there is also a difference in the call. The Red billed curassow makes a deep booming call, while the wattled curassow is one of two species of whistling curassows. This species is one of the rare curassows in zoos, with only a handful of European zoos keeping them. Chester zoo keeps them and they have bred them on two occasions, but at the moment, their three birds are related, so they need to bring in a new pair of females and place a female with each of their males. Their current female (the daughter of the older male, and the brother of the younger one, with which she shares an exhibit) could then move on to another zoo, and then the captive population could start to grow. As with many rare birds species, there is an excess of males. The same goes for the majority of birds of paradise too. The best thing to do would be to send an unrelated captive bred pair, back to Brazil for reintroduction, or at least breed, so their off spring can be represented in the wild population, and then send a couple of unrelated pairs back over to europe, to enhance our gene pool. This is the ISIS listing for this species as of the 28th March 2008:

Amsterdam 1.0
Antwerp 1.1
Burger's zoo 1.1
Chester 2.1
Lourosa 2.0
Sao Paulo 2.1

Category:

Pets & Animals

Tags:

• red
• billed
• curassow
• crax
• pauxi
• mitu