HIALEAH, Fla.
Darcy Henthorn can’t wait to meet her little bundles of joy.All 20 of them.
The Oklahoma City Zoo curator of birds recently claimed 20 flamingo eggs in Miami to exhibit in her zoo. The zoo is now one of more than a dozen wildlife parks across the county that have received the popular pink birds from a former South Florida racetrack.
Hialeah Park hasn’t held a horse race since 2001, but the 300 flamingos that once flew over the track still live inside its 11/8-mile racing oval. The Miami Metrozoo now collects some of Hialeah’s flamingo eggs and distributes them across the country. Hundreds of eggs have been collected here since the 1980s, wildlife officials said.
The eggs, which are a little smaller than a soda can, are laid on soil nests that resemble small volcanoes.
After they are collected by Metrozoo workers, they are stored in temperature-controlled coolers, given identification numbers, examined, sorted and placed in an incubator. The eggs are then stowed away until other zoos can claim them. Once the birds hatch, they are raised by hand.
“It’s going to be a lot of work,” Miss Henthorn said. “But it’s going to be well worth it.”
This year the eggs are headed to the St. Louis Zoo, the Bronx Zoo in New York, the Birmingham Zoo in Alabama and Oklahoma City. Hialeah flamingos now roost in several major cities, including Albuquerque, N.M., Tulsa, Okla., and Sacramento, Calif., said Sherry Branch, an Association of Zoos and Aquariums committee member. The eggs add unrelated birds to the zoos’ flocks so there isn’t as much inbreeding.
“It’s allowed a lot of the zoos that have smaller groups to increase their numbers so the birds will have more reproductive success,” said Miss Branch, the curator of birds at SeaWorld Orlando and Discovery Cove.
Carl Burch, the Miami Metrozoo’s zoological supervisor, said the donated eggs are valuable to zoos because they come from a captive flock that has a strong reproductive history.
“They’re a reliable resource that doesn’t deplete wild birds,” he said.
The first birds came to Hialeah Park in the 1920s from the Caribbean, said track superintendent Jesus Perdomo, but they soon flew back.
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