SINGAPORE: Mark Rusli remembers the time a baby bird died in his care.

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.

“A couple of seconds later, it turned pale and died.”

It was a mistake he vowed never to make again. And in the two years since, he has been able to keep his word.
“When I’m feeding a bird, I know now to take my time, not rush it and just watch the bird carefully,” he said.

Rusli is one of the park’s four hand-rearers, which means it is his job to raise baby birds by hand. It is, he said with a grin, much like being a foster parent to a newborn.

The birds come to him even before they are hatched, as his duties include hatching the eggs besides monitoring their growth until they are old enough to join the larger aviaries.

“They’re helpless and naked, and we need to feed them, sometimes every two hours when they’re really young,” he said.
Smaller species like pigeons and passerines, which are perching birds, require a high level of care for six to eight weeks, while the process can take up to eight months or more for larger species like macaws.

Some chicks the team receives are injured or have been abandoned by the parents.

But most of their efforts go into raising birds that have conservation value. In these cases, the team removes the first few batches of eggs laid to incubate them artificially, to increase their chances of survival and, ultimately, raise their numbers.

“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 (WRS), which manages the Jurong Bird Park, Singapore Zoo, Night Safari and River Safari, more than 100 chicks have hatched so far this year.