Three months into his job as a junior animal care officer in the Jurong Bird Park, he had been hand-feeding a chick and mistook the signs it was displaying.“He was probably trying to take in a breath of air, instead of wanting to eat. But I gave him papaya — it was a little too wet, so maybe instead of trying to swallow the papaya, he inhaled the water,” recalled the 33-year-old.It was a mistake he vowed never to make again. And in the two years since, he has been able to keep his word.
“Sometimes the parents aren’t very experienced, so they might raise just one chick out of a clutch of three,” he said. “If we were to remove all the three eggs and raise them, they’d all have a higher chance of surviving.”This makes his role key to the park’s conservation efforts. According to Wildlife Reserves Singapore , which manages the Jurong Bird Park, Singapore Zoo, Night Safari and River Safari, more than 100 chicks have hatched so far this year.One fifth are threatened species.
For example, chicks that had been abandoned by their parents could have fallen out of their nests and suffered internal injuries that might not be immediately obvious.First, he prepares the food for the chicks in nurseries, carefully stirring in the right amount of formula — the birds’ version of babies’ milk, he said with a chuckle — and ensuring that the temperature is right so as not to burn them.
Besides feeding and charting their growth, Rusli has other tasks that invite comparisons to a parent of a newborn, such as monitoring the poo of particular birds — with the accompanying delight of watching a young one doing it successfully.Whichever their shift — 6am to 3.30pm or 8.30am to 6pm — he added that the moments of excitement for the team, when they would be on high alert, are also when a rare chick or egg is in the nursery.“We’re always texting each other ...
“It was very funny because when he threw this to me, he was kind of cautious about it … like he thought I was going to flat-out reject it,” Rusli recalled. “But I thought it would be an interesting challenge.”He was not averse to the idea, but he acknowledged that birds were “not an interest” to him at that time.
But he also pointed to the satisfaction he feels when he sees a bird he has raised thriving in the aviaries, particularly if it comes from a threatened species.
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