KARACHI: The zoo administration has found a ‘replacement’ to dismiss the news that recently appeared in a section of the press that the facility reporting three puma cub deaths in a short period had also lost a male macaw over a month ago, sources told Dawn on Tuesday.

However, the zoo couldn’t find the right species as a ‘replacement’, proving its own claim that the male macaw is still alive false.

During a recent visit to the zoo, two keepers were found hand-feeding a young blue-and-gold macaw (Ara ararauna) in a cage housing two green-winged macaw (Ara chloropterus) chicks along with their mother.

As the keepers fed the young macaw, the mother perched on a log made loud calls, as if she was screaming, and changed its position quite a few times in the cage.

Her squawks stopped only when the keepers left the cage, taking away the young macaw after 20 minutes or so. Although it was released in an adjacent empty cage, the mother continued to show anger and made harsh noises.

Upon asking, the zoo staff insisted that the blue-and-gold macaw had fathered the chicks and had been separated so it couldn’t harm its babies.

“As you can see the male macaw is alive. Hand-feeding is part of its training to tame it,” zoo director Fahim Khan said firmly.

He, however, had no satisfactory reply to offer when questioned over having two different macaw species.

Speaking on condition of anonymity, a retired zoo official said: “Even if the zoo had found the right macaw species for the chicks, their mother would never have accepted it. In fact, a stranger male macaw would have killed the babies. Perhaps, that’s why the zoo decided to bring a young male macaw so it couldn’t attack the chicks.”

It may be recalled that the zoo lost a male macaw over a month ago, bringing the total number of mortalities to four over the past few weeks.

The large brightly coloured parrot had fathered two chicks, the first births from green-winged macaws at the zoo in decades.

Tragically, the male bird died from injuries following a collision with an iron grill of its cage when it made a flight in fear upon seeing the staff trying to fix an iron net on the enclosure.

Faced with strong criticism following the death of three puma cubs, the zoo administration refused to admit that a macaw had died and insisted that it was alive.

Its argument that the male macaw had been kept away from the family on the grounds that it might harm the chicks was rejected by seasoned parrot breeders who said that a macaw father, like many other male bird species, was caring towards its offspring and there was no need to separate it from the family.

Meanwhile, the inquiry into the death of a puma cub is yet to take off. The cub was the last of the three babies born over a month ago. The staff blamed one death on malnutrition, the other on tetanus while the third cub that reportedly fell into the enclosure of adult pumas was mauled to death.

This year has also seen the deaths of a Bengal tiger (the third death of a big cat within five years) and five black bucks.

Published in Dawn, July 13th, 2016