Assiniboine Park Zoo welcomes critically endangered bird

A critically endangered bird is now making its home at Winnipeg’s Assiniboine Park Zoo.

The zoo announced Thursday that Chad, a six-year-old blue-billed curassow, now calls its Toucan Ridge habitat home. He was originally from a zoo in Tennessee.

“He's a pretty interesting little character,” said Danny Collicutt, a curator at Assiniboine Park Zoo. “He is really loving exploring this open space that we have here in Toucan Ridge.

“He really just likes exploring and he likes being around people. So often, when we're hanging out here in Toucan Ridge, he'll be down on the pathways and kind of exploring and just checking people out.”

The blue-billed curassow is native to Colombia, and is similar to a turkey or chicken. It is a critically endangered species due to hunting and deforestation.

Chad is part of the zoo’s special survival plan, and staff plan to pair him with another female blue-billed curassow.

“Because we work with the other zoos from all across North America, he came here as a way for us to continue having other populations of curassows in zoos for breeding,” Collicutt said.

“So we don't have another female here at the moment, but having this one here, we can kind of get used to how works, taking care of Chad as well as other curassows. And there's a potential that in the future, we could have a female so that we could breed here and potentially send to other places as well.”