Adult Wild Scarlet Macaw
There was a time in my life when I lived egg incubation and psittacine pediatrics. I’ve been responsible for thousands of eggs and chicks in “the days.” Recently, the work in Guatemala reminds me how much one embryo in one egg means to me, and to others. It is a life full of possibility, and to lose one egg, is to lose beauty and wonder.
Dr. Fernando Martinez of ARCAS pulling two eggs out of a clutch of 4 to give to Dr. Melvin Merida of WCS to transport to Laguna del Tigre
This past week I got to witness the first experiment in seeing if egg manipulation will help the macaws here. CONAP, ARCAS, BALAAM, and WCS are all working together to attempt to incubate eggs and raise chicks deep into the Mayan Biosphere Reserve, Laguna del Tigre.
Two eggs were removed from a captive pair of breeding macaws at ARCAS and then transported very carefully up into the reserve. It is a very bumpy, rough road, and this time of year the mud makes the going even slower. What can be a 3 hour drive turned into over 5 hours because of a broken clutch in one of the trucks. We were worried about transporting the eggs, in part because of the rough road, and also because the eggs were young. The two eggs showed an embryo that perhaps only had a day of incubation, and the other with less than week old. Eggs this young are fragile, and need to be kept at 99 degrees. We learned that it is somewhat easy to maintain the eggs at 99 if the outside temperature is around 100 degrees, which it was.
Melvin and Challo looking for missing clutch piece in mud where were we got stuck
Once up at the station in the forest where the eggs
will be incubated, we held our breath while we candled the eggs, which means
shining a light into the egg in a dark room. Did they survive that long
ride? Indeed they did!
Live embryo in egg (notice the red blood vessels surrounding embryo)
Happy incubator crew after installing live eggs in new incubator room
These eggs, this forest, this planet, all are our territory. May we prove adequate to guard and to cherish
these treasures accordingly as we continue to howl our proclamation that every
egg has inherent worth and dignity, as does every being.
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