Shoebills in captivity

vogelcommando

vogelcommando

Well-Known Member
10+ year member
Because of a discussion in another thread ( Historical notes from Artis [Artis Royal Zoo] start by post 26 ) I became aware of the fact that there still is no thread about the historical and recent zoo-population of this very iconic bird.
For the European historic and actual population we have Zootierliste but this seems to have some missing and/or misleading/lacking information and for the rest of world there is even less information.
Therefor I want to gather in this thread as much as possible information about the captive history and current population of the Shoebill.
To start here a list of collection which have kept the species for sure :

- Alexandria
- Artis Amsterdam
- Antwerp
- Basle
- Bristol
- Brownsville
- Budapest
- Cairo
- Chicago Brookfield
- Copenhagen
- Dubai
- Duisburg
- Berlin Tierpark
- Entebbe
- Frankfurt
- Ito
- Khartoum
- Kuweit
- London
- Lubumbashi
- Pairi Daiza
- Philadelphia
- Prague
- Rotterdam Blijdorp
- San Antonio
- San Diego
- Singapore Jurong
- Stuttgart
- Tampa
- Tokyo Ueno
- Vienna
- Walsrode
- Wassenaar
- Washington
- Berlin Zoo
- Zurich
Now its up to us to collect as much as possible information about all these holdings so anybody with information, please share it !
 
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London Zoo acquired two shoebills on13th March 1860; these were almost certainly the first living shoebills in Europe.

One only lived for about a month, dying on 12th April 1860; the other lived for almost a year, dying on 12th March 1861.

The shoebills were brought to London by John Pretherick who contributed an article on them to the “Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London“ (1860).
 
vogelcommando said:
Because of a discussion in another thread ( Historical notes from Artis [Artis Royal Zoo] start by post 26 ) I became aware of the fact that there still is no thread about the historical and recent zoo-population of this very iconic bird.
For the European historic and actual population we have Zootierliste but this seems to have some missing and/or misleading/lacking information and for the rest of world there is even less information.
Therefor I want to gather in this thread as much as possible information about the captive history and current population of the Shoebill.
To start here a list of collection which have kept the species for sure :

- Alexandria
- Artis Amsterdam
- Antwerp
- Basle
- Bristol
- Brownsville
- Budapest
- Cairo
- Chicago Brookfield
- Copenhagen
- Dubai
- Duisburg
- Berlin Tierpark
- Entebbe
- Frankfurt
- Ito
- Khartoum
- Kuweit
- London
- Lubumbashi
- Pairi Daiza
- Philadelphia
- Prague
- Rotterdam Blijdorp
- San Antonio
- San Diego
- Singapore Jurong
- Stuttgart
- Tampa
- Tokyo Ueno
- Vienna
- Walsrode
- Wassenaar
- Washington
- Berlin Zoo
- Zurich
Now its up to us to collect as much as possible information about all these holdings so anybody with information, please share it !
Click to expand...


Just discovered I forgot a number of European collections :
- Planckendael
- Hamburg Hagenbeck
- Hannover
- Paris Jardin des Plantes
- Napoli
- Rome
- Malaga
 
Stefan Verhoeven said:
Al Wabra also had them. Not sure ig they are still there, or were they went.
Click to expand...
The collection sent almost all their birds to ACTP, including the shoebills, I was told it was a breeding pair (I don't know if they ever were able to rear successfully the chicks). Afterwards they went to Singapore.
 
arafan said:
The collection sent almost all their birds to ACTP, including the shoebills, I was told it was a breeding pair (I don't know if they ever were able to rear successfully the chicks). Afterwards they went to Singapore.
Click to expand...

My understanding is that none of the birds sent to ACTP actually ever stayed there except the parrots. All other birds were almost immediately transferred to other facilities via ACTP. Al Wabra's Shoebills went to Jurong via ACTP and then a pair was given to Pairi Daiza by Jurong.

~Thylo
 
A few other snippets about shoebills that may be of interest.

In a paper on bird longevity, published in the Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London (1938), Stanley Flower records that a shoebill, acquired by Antwerp Zoo in 1926, was still alive on 21st September 1937.

In the same article, Flower lists four long lived shoebills at Giza Zoo:-
  1. Arrived 28th May 1902; died 15th August 1924
  2. Arrived 28th May 1902; died 20th January 1928
  3. Arrived 28th May 1902; still alive 26th February 1938
  4. Arrived 28th March 1917; still alive 26th February 1938
 
I do know that Cincinnati has held Shoebill in the past when Jungle Trails opened, but no other details on specific animals besides that unfortunately.
 
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