Feeding baby birds takes extensive knowledge of all the different species, skill, patience, and a firm but delicate hand—a challenging, but rewarding, job indeed!

Bird keeper Phil Unitt prepares food in the Avian Propagation Center's brooder facility while bird keeper Pat Witman checks on 1 of the 12 indoor brooder enclosures. The APC keepers' daily routine includes: weighing eggs and chicks; turning eggs in incubators and candling eggs (holding them to a light source to check development); receiving and processing any new eggs coming into the APC; preparing diets; cleaning enclosures, food pans, and water dishes; checking on juvenile and adult birds; conferring with curators and veterinarians; and recording detailed records of all aspects of the facility.

Following nearly a decade of planning, the Avian Propagation Center (APC) opened at the Zoo on June 18, 1980. It was planned and built with the input of colleagues from many facilities around the country, and was designed with four separate areas. One is the incubator building, where egg receiving and recording, incubation, egg preparation, and hatching take place. Another is the brooder house, where chicks grow and develop under the watchful eyes of the keepers (in the building center in this photo); when they outgrow this space, they move to the larger brooder pens where they complete their development (to the left in the photo). A fourth area is the 40 breeding enclosures for breeding adult birds or housing delicate species, with an additional 19 of these enclosures located on the roof of the brooder building (seen here on top of the brooder house).

Keeper Pat Witman feeds an eagle chick.

1980

Conservation 1977 - 1986

The Zoo’s Avian Propagation Center (APC) opened in 1980, an off-exhibit center for hatching, raising, and caring for endangered and delicate species of birds that needed a little extra TLC or that need more offspring to be raised to increase populations with low numbers.

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