The new female brown kiwi chick hatched at the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute. (Wesley Bailey/Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute)
There’s a new chick in town.
Meet the brown kiwi chick, who emerged from her egg at the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute in Front Royal, Va. between July 29 and 30 and was moved to the kiwi facility late last week.
Her mom is Rua, who laid the egg about 75 days prior to her hatching. Brown kiwis lay the second largest eggs compared to their body size of any bird—about 20 percent of the female’s weight, the zoo says. (Not like this chick cares about her mom. According to the zoo, brown kiwis are born with the ability to hunt for themselves, and don’t rely on their parents.)
Zookeepers kept the egg in an incubator during those 75 days. You can see the incubation room in this video from the zoo, which showed the egg two days before hatching and explains how the New Zealand native bird is “just very bizarre, reproductively, in general.”
The plan for the chick is to match her with a male through the Association of Zoos and Aquariums’ Species Survival Plan—kiwis are monogamous, per the zoo. While the chick will live with her partner, she won’t fly. Kiwis are one of the birds that don’t take flight.
Back in 1975, the Smithsonian was the first organization outside New Zealand to hatch a brown kiwi. This is the sixth kiwi egg to be successfully hatched at the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute since 2012.
Rachel Kurzius