Birds Of San Diego Zoo’s Wild Animal Park
April 21, 2010 by Rob Hurlbut
Victoria Crowned Pigeon
This colorful post consists of birds I snapped while on safari at The Wild Animal Park this past weekend. I feel pretty confident about my identification of all the birds in these photos except for the one above and the one below. If anyone knows for sure what kind of birds they are, let me know.
UPDATE: The top photo is a Victoria Crowned Pigeon & the black bird below is a Boat Tailed Grackle.
Boat Tailed Grackle
This photo was snapped while my companion and I ate our gourmet lunch. Even though I had money specifically for what I knew would be overpriced food, it really didn’t help ease the sting of the price tag. The problem is that when I got to places like The Wild Animal Park, the San Diego Zoo or to street festival events, I really look forward to eating while I’m there. So, just for you curious types that would like to what I ate, where I ate it and what I paid for it: I ate at the Mombasa Island Cooker where I enjoyed (out on the covered terrace of course) a gourmet western cheeseburger, garlic fries and a glass of merlot, for which I paid $16.
Lorikeet
The lorikeet exhibit was one of the more interactive and “touchable” things to do at The Wild Animal Park. You can wander through the exhibit and most of the lorikeets will come up to you, much like pigeons do at parks and bus stations. If you have $3 to spend, you may purchase cups of nectar that you can hold out in your hand, which entices the lorikeets to land on you, walk down your arm and drink.
African Crowned Crane
There are a lot of these African crowned cranes in the park, and they seem to like to travel in pairs. Photographically speaking, subjects that have both black AND white in them make proper exposure very difficult. In the photo above, the highlights are a bit blown out, in order to accommodate the deep black feathers.
Shoebill
The shoebills in The Wild Animal Park were the only birds that I found to be a little bit scary. For starters, the top of their head came up to about my chin and their bill is about the size of an encyclopedia. (An “encyclopedia” is a large book full of facts compiled by learned individuals that people used to use as a reference to write reports or settle arguments. An encyclopedia should NOT be compared to the graffiti-on-the-wall WIKIPEDIA, which is an online dumping ground of psuedo-facts written by anyone with at least monkey-level typing skills.) Anyway, a bird that can stand on tippy-toes and look me in the eye with a blunt instrument for a beak gets respect, and a healthy dose of fear out of me.
Black Crowned Night Heron
According to this website, the black crowned night heron is a local (San Diego) bird that happens to fly into the Wild Animal Park to hunt and hang out. I’m not sure about any effects this has on the non-native animals that are actually brought into the park, but I watched this heron snatch this baby bird from a nest and then eat it. It actually caused quite a ruckus from the people watching as well as the momma bird that tried, in vain to get her baby back.
I have more photos and related posts below:
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4 Responses to “Birds Of San Diego Zoo’s Wild Animal Park”
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Just went to the Wild Park yesterday and was seeing the shots others took. To answer your questions the first bird is the Victoria Crowned Pigeon and the second is a Boat Tailed Grackle (which is also a visitor to the park like the heron). I have never been to Ballboa park and now after seeing your shots I will have to go thanks for the photos.
Thank you very much for that information! I will update the post right away. You will really enjoy Balboa Park, and just about everything photo-worthy is free.
Love the picture of the Shoebill. I was once the keeper for this bird. At that point in time there was one male and one female Shoebill on the island outside of the Mombasa Pavilion. The first time I went out there to hand feed the pair, the female was reasonable, the male grabbed my bucket and chased me off the island. I am not ashamed to admit that he had me running.
Later, I had a clear plexiglass shield made. I was secretly chuckling the first time he ran to me and smacked his open maw into the shield.
He was patient and very observant and eventually learned when I had the shield and when I didn't.
As for the Black Crowned Night Heron. Yes, an indigenous bird, not part of the collection. We referred to them as "free loaders". They constantly were preying on our ducklings.
The photos are lovely, thank you for sharing.
Wow these are some brilliant pictures – I love the pic of the crane – great colours.
Not so keen on the heron though, cos he's eating that little guy!