Photo: Oregon Zoo
The Oregon Zoo is well-known for its California condor recovery efforts, but now it’s working to save an even rarer bird: the sihek (Guam kingfisher), extinct in the wild for nearly 40 years but poised to make a comeback.
Three of these small, brightly colored birds have been thriving in the zoo’s Vollum Aviary since 2024. The siheks at the zoo are all males, and housing them together is a new approach — one that bodes especially well for species recovery efforts.
“The conventional wisdom has always been that you can’t house male siheks together because they’re so territorial and aggressive,” said Erica Royer, a sihek expert with the Smithsonian’s National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute. “But the Oregon Zoo has shown us that, actually, under the right circumstances, you can keep them together.”
Royer, one of the foremost authorities on sihek care and breeding, says this new approach helps immensely with the recovery effort, freeing up space for breeding pairs at other locations. And with fewer than 130 of these birds left in the world, every egg counts.
“Currently, the recovery program has 81 males and 44 females,” Royer said. “It’s not ideal for housing breeding pairs when you have so many males taking up single spaces. It’s been awesome to see these boys living their best lives in Portland.”
In the zoo’s Vollum Aviary, the siheks have been getting along not just with each other but with a variety of bird species, from blue-bellied rollers to emerald starlings.
“They’re comfortable sharing space with each other, and they don’t interact much with the other birds,” said Nicole LaGreco, who oversees the Oregon Zoo’s bird population. “They’re very active at night. Our motion cameras have captured them flying around, hunting and eating insects.”
Like condors, the last siheks were brought into human care in the 1980s in an attempt to save the species from extinction. Non-native tree snakes had all but wiped them out on their native island of Guam.
Although the snake population continues to make reintroduction impossible on Guam, nine young siheks were released in 2024 on Palmyra Atoll, which has protected status and is free of invasive predators. So far, conservationists report, these birds are thriving, and some appear to have produced eggs this year.
“We’re so honored that we’ve been trusted to care for these birds,” LaGreco said. “Hopefully, this approach opens up a lot more room at places that are breeding birds for eventual reintroduction to the wild.”
Source: Oregon Zoo