A pair of sloth bears and a pair of green iguanas have reached the city zoo from Nehru Zoological Park, Hyderabad.
The new arrivals were brought in exchange for rhea, a long-legged flightless bird.
A nine-member team, led by zoo superintendent T.V. Anilkumar and senior veterinary surgeon Jacob Alexander and comprising a supervisor and keepers, left for Hyderabad via road on March 7 with four white and four brown rheas and returned on Monday with a pair of seven-year-old sloth bears and a pair of two-year-old green iguanas.
The zoo at present has only Himalayan bears. It had a pair of sloth bears in its animal collection long ago, but except for one, their young ones did not survive. Even the last sloth bear, a female, died of health problems a while ago. The new pair of sloth bears will fill that gap.
Meanwhile, rhea birds born at the city zoo have given wings to its animal exchange programmes. In recent years, the zoo animal collection has got a boost through animals brought in exchange for rhea.
Last year, the Pilikula Biological Park in Karnataka had given king cobras and four Whitaker’s boa to the zoo here in return for two pairs each of white and brown rhea and swamp deer.
The city zoo had also received reticulated python, white peacock, and painted stork from the Vandalur zoo in Chennai in exchange for rhea. The Vandalur zoo had way back in 2016 taken rhea and hog deer in exchange for white peacock and rock python.
The city zoo had earlier received a pair of hyenas from the Kanpur zoo in exchange for four pais of rheas. It had earlier provided rhea to the Delhi zoo.
The zoo had started incubating rhea eggs in its hospital way back in 2015 after it found the eggs did not survive in the open in the enclosure. Two male rhea and one female at the zoo were the progenitor of the rheas that the zoo has successfully exchanged.
The female rhea’s eggs, weighing around 600 gm, were hatched through incubation resulting in 60 rheas in total. However, the birds were very sensitive and as they were long-legged were prone to a lot of problems that required careful attention and monitoring by the zoo veterinarian.
The rhea will continue to be the trump card for the zoo in future exchange programmes, including a possible one involving lions from Indore.
