Meet Scuttles, the first red-legged
kittiwake born in captivity
Credit: Jason Wettstein
The Alaska Sea Life Center didn’t just sponsor the first-ever successful captive breeding of the threatened (and mysterious) Steller’s eider. Along with love among eiders, the biologists also served as match-maker for red-legged kittiwakes.
In what may be the first successful hatch of a red-legged kittiwake in captivity, a tiny chick nicknamed Scuttles pecked into the world on July 17.
This is a big deal in the world of seabird science. Black-legged kittiwakes wing all over coastal Alaska — perching on dock pilings, screeching off cliff-side nests, wheeling among flocks of other sea-gull-like predators on shore and harbor.
But red-legged kittiwakes are one of the rarest and most exotic birds on the planet, limited to five or six rugged cliff faces on remote islands in the Bering Sea.
Listed as a Species of Concern under the U.S. Endangered Species Act and endangered in Russia, the species has undergone dramatic declines for reasons that remain unclear.
Here’s more detail in a story from Jason Wettstein at the Alaska SeaLife Center:
Red-legged kittiwakes face a variety of challenges in the wild including reduced food availability and climate changes, as well as introduced predators such as rats and fox.
The red-legged kittiwakes appear only in a limited geographic range, so any one threat, or even a random natural disaster, could leave the species population at critically low numbers.
For the last four years, the center’s red-legged kittiwakes have been laying infertile eggs in the mud and kelp nests that the aviculturists help build for them on the rocky face of the exhibit.
This year, when senior aviculturist Tasha DiMarzio candled the eggs, one of them was fertile.
“Having seen the adults copulating earlier in the season, I had high hopes for this year’s eggs but I still did not believe it when I saw the developing embryo,” says DiMarzio.
(Candling is the process of putting a light behind an egg to see if it is viable.)
The kittiwake chick, Scuttles, hatched on July 17.
At hatch, Scuttles weighed in at 34 grams and now weighs in at a whopping 224 grams and rising.
Scuttles gets weighed
Credit: Jason Wettstein“It’s really been a long wait for this chick,” says Heidi Cline, avian curator for the Alaska SeaLife Center. “We were relying entirely on the birds’ natural instincts. They were hand reared birds and we couldn’t teach them to do this — it’s just been trial and error until they got it right.”
“It’s so exciting to see these parents behaving as they would in the wild,” says Nicole Brandt, aviculturist at the center. “They are regurgitating small fish, kelp, krill, and squid for the chick and are keeping it warm and protected.”
SeaLife Center researchers will not know whether Scuttles is male or female until 2 weeks after his veterinary check. “We’re happy to welcome Scuttles into the flock either way,” says Brandt.
