As I mentioned in another thread, I'm reading Where Song Began, and this is reminding me how many Australian birds I'd like to see. (Like the author, I'm including both Tasmania and mainland New Guinea in Australia.) I'm pretty sure every Australian parrot in captivity can be found in some zoo, zoos tend to have a wide variety of estrildid finches, and magpie geese and laughing kookaburras are also common. Australia also has a large number of duck species I'd like to see, but I'll leave that aside for the moment, since most of the Australian birds I most want to see are songbirds. (I wrote "passerines" in the title, but the only non-songbird passerines Australia has are broadbills and I'd love to see one of those as well.) The Australian songbirds I'd most like to see are the lyrebirds (either or both species), apostlebird, white-winged chough, scrubbirds (either species), Australian magpies, and any species of honeyeaters, though I'd be happy to see most any Australian species. (I'm usually happy to see birds period, except common starlings.) I'm also interested in bowerbirds and birds of paradise, even though I've seen both before and thus know US zoos have them. I'm fairly certain that to have any chance of seeing a scrubbird I'd have to go to Australia, seeing as both species are currently endangered but even Australian zoos don't seem to be captive-breeding them. I looked up all the other birds of particular interest to me on Zootierliste, and observed that with the exception of the lesser friarbird (held by Wuppertal) and the Australian magpie, all the birds which most interest me are formerly but not currently held by European zoos (including both species of lyrebird, at one zoo each). However the US seems to do worse than Europe when it comes to birds, so it wouldn't surprise me if no US zoo ever held any of these except maybe Australian magpies. Still, I never expected US zoos have to have kagus, so I've decided to be optimistic. It still seems plausible to me that American zoos might have Australian magpies, and maybe some farsighted zookeeper somewhere obtained honeyeaters or lyrebirds. Even if they haven't, bowerbirds and birds-of-paradise are fun to see, and I know that Miami and San Diego have fawn-breasted bowerbirds and tons of zoos (including the Dallas World Aquarium) have Ragianna birds-of-paradise. And maybe some Australian songbirds that wouldn't even have occurred to me are present in US zoos. So yeah, aside from the cases I mentioned, does anyone know of US zoos with Australian passerines which aren't estrildid finches?
I got broadbills confused with pittas somehow. My mind works in peculiar ways. Still, I'd be happy to see any pitta that's not the hooded pitta, so my point stands.
The San Antonio zoo has blue-faced honeyeaters! I know that I was interested in honeyeaters the last time I went, so either I forgot in the excitement of some of their other birds (they have a lot of neat birds and I had memorable experiences with three of them last time), or else they weren't on display. This time I had a great experience with them and wouldn't have forgotten even if I hadn't started this thread. After thinking I wasn't going to see them, I went back to the cage one last time and they both flew out to investigate me (not sure why they didn't do that the first two times I was at the cage). Then I went back to the cage one last time for real and one of them flew out to investigate again.
I made this list some time ago so I’m not 100% certain of its accuracy. Technically, some of the species found in US zoos aren’t the right species due to some taxonomic changes (emerald dove, for example) but it’s all relatively close. Southern Cassowary Emu Magpie Goose Spotted Whistling-Duck Plumed Whistling-Duck Wandering Whistling-Duck Cape Barren Goose Freckled Duck Black Swan Australian Shelduck Radjah Shelduck Green Pygmy-Goose Cotton Pygmy-Goose Maned Duck Australian Shoveler Garganey Chestnut Teal Pink-eared Duck White-eyed Duck Australian Brushturkey Blue-breasted Quail Little Penguin Black-necked Stork* Cattle Egret Straw-necked Ibis Black Kite Buff-banded Rail Painted Buttonquail Sarus Crane Brolga Bush Thick-knee Masked Lapwing Silver Gull Emerald Dove Common Bronzewing Crested Pigeon Squatter Pigeon Wonga Pigeon Diamond Dove Wompoo Fruit-Dove Rose-crowned Fruit-Dove Collared Imperial Pigeon Pied Imperial Pigeon Tawny Frogmouth Laughing Kookaburra Blue-winged Kookaburra Collared Kingfisher Dollarbird Palm Cockatoo Red-tailed Black-Cockatoo Yellow-tailed Black-Cockatoo Gang-gang Cockatoo Pink Cockatoo Galah Long-billed Corella Little Corella Sulphur-crested Cockatoo Cockatiel Superb Parrot Regent Parrot Princess Parrot Australian King-Parrot Red-winged Parrot Eclectus Parrot Bourke's Parrot Turquoise Parrot Scarlet-chested Parrot Port Lincoln Parrot Mallee Ringneck Crimson Rosella Eastern Rosella Pale-headed Rosella Western Rosella Red-rumped Parrot Mulga Parrot Hooded Parrot Golden-shouldered Parrot Double-eyed Fig-Parrot Budgerigar Musk Lorikeet Rainbow Lorikeet Scaly-breasted Lorikeet Blue-faced Honeyeater White-breasted Woodswallow Australian Magpie Fawn-breasted Bowerbird Metallic Starling Painted Firetail Finch Diamond Firetail Finch Star Finch Plum-headed Finch Zebra Finch Double-barred Finch Masked Finch Long-tailed Finch Black-throated Finch Blue-faced Parrotfinch Gouldian Finch
Unsurprisingly, most of those are either parrots or estrildids, both of which are also well-established in the pet trade. (Indeed those two groups pretty much are the avian pet trade.) The part of your list which answers my question consists of five animals (three of which I've seen), though you seem to be looking at Australia the country, since several New Guinea species I know are found in the US are omitted. The big surprise is the white-breasted woodswallow. I would not in my wildest dreams have thought that an American zoo would have woodswallows. Do you recall which zoo(s) had them? Also, while my question was about non-estrildid passerines, as I said I'm also interested in Australian waterfowl (also parrots but those are usually advertised on zoos' websites and they dominate both the Australian birds zoos have and the parrot collections zoos have), and four of the five Australian waterfowl I really want to see are on that list: freckled ducks, maned ducks, pink-eared ducks, and Cape Barren geese. (Musk ducks, sadly, are not.) Since none of those except for the pink-ears are particularly colorful or weird looking (and those seem to be the criteria for waterfowl) I'm pleasantly surprised at that too.
I have seen woodswallows at Cincinnati and Miami. Most of these waterfowl are established because of the work of Mike Lubbock, who runs Sylvan Heights Bird Park. The only holder of pink-eared duck besides them is currently Central Park, though San Diego formerly had the species. Freckled ducks recently expanded rapidly, and zoos such as Sedgwick County, Miami, Busch Gardens Tampa, Fort Worth, and Columbus now hold the species, among others. Maned ducks are a bit of an oddity which I’ve seen at San Antonio and Omaha. Cape Barren geese are probably the most common of all of those species. An attempt was made to establish the musk duck in captivity but it was unsuccessful.
I was just at San Antonio. I was looking through the signs along the row that holds crocodilians, turtles, and waterfowl for anything interesting on my way to the Hixon Bird House, but I wasn't super-methodical about it. Are they in that area, or somewhere else? Are the woodswallows at Miami in Wings of Asia? I find new surprises every time I go (which is partially because I've never been able to spend as much time as I want at any visit); I'd love to spend a whole day in that aviary sometime. (Hell, I'd kind of like to live there.) But even with a whole day I probably wouldn't even have noticed them if I didn't know to look for them; I only noticed the bowerbird for the first time last year because he was making a racket.
I have seen them in multiple areas of the zoo. I do not know where they are at present. Yes, the woosswallows are in Wings of Asia. All you have to do in that aviary is open your eyes, and look up.
