San Diego, CA (special) -- Determined to help reestablish four biblical animals in the wilds of the Golan and the Negev, Gabi Eshkar, chief veterinarian of Jerusalem's Biblical Zoo, recently spent two weeks visiting the San Diego Zoo and the San Diego Wild Animal Park to compare notes and to review techniques. 

The Israeli veterinarian expects to adapt many of the techniques utilized by the Wild Animal Park in breeding the endangered California Condor to his own zoo's campaign to breed the Griffin Vulture--the largest bird of the Middle East.Other endangered species which will be bred at the Biblical Zoo in Jerusalem and eventually released into the wild are the Arabian Oryx, Persian Fallow Deer, and Wild Ass. 

At a University Club breakfast meeting prior to driving to the Wild Animal Park, Eshkar met with the executive board of the San Diego Young Leadership Group of the Friends of the Jerusalem Foundation. 

The San Diego Young Leadership Group, chaired by Robert Price, is the chief financial backer of a section of the Biblical Zoo known as the "Biblelands Preserve." This preserve will be home to the four endangered species as well as other animals referred to in Hebrew Scriptures. On a pedestrian bridge overlooking the preserve, signs in Hebrew, Arabic and English identify not only the animals by name but also by the passages in the Bible that mentions them. 

The San Diego Wild Animal Park has had a successful program breeding the Arabian Oryx (also known as the White Oryx) and reintroducing it to Saudi Arabia, and "now we are starting to introduce it in Israel," Eshkar said.  Previous efforts to introduce the animal in the southern Negev failed because the animals would cross the border into Jordan, where hunters would shoot them for food. With Jordan and Israel then technically still at war, there was no opportunity to negotiate cooperative agreements to protect the animals  However, now that there is a formal peace between the two neighboring countries, "we have a nice cooperation between our naturalist authority and their naturalist authority," Eshkar said.

Arabian Oryx

A small breeding group of the Arabian Oryx will be maintained int he Biblelands Preserve for purposes of education and conservation. "Normal people cannot see this animal in the wild; it is far away in the desert," he said. "If you go with a jeep maybe many hours you can see them, but most people don't." 

The Wild Ass is another desert animal which has been bred successfully in captivity and reintroduced into the Negev, Eshkar said. "They are doing very well in the wild," he said.  There are two major breeding groups--one of which is in the large crater in the Negev at Mitzpe Ramon. Similar to the Arabian Oryx, a small breeding group will be maintained at the Biblelands Preserve for education and conservation purposes.

Wild Asses

Another section of the preserve recreates the forested areas of the Galilee near the Lebanese border. This will be the section for the breeding of Persian Fallow Deer--a species that the Israelis imported from Iran. 

When the government of the Shah of Iran was collapsing 20 years ago, Israelis leaving the country took on the plane with them "five boxes of Persian Fallow Deer." They brought the animals to Israel, "started to breed them, and we now have the biggest population of this animal in the world," Eshkar said. "There are almost 200 of them." 

At the Biblelands Preserve, "we will have a big group of them--20 or 30- which we will breed for the next 10 years and all the babies will go into the wild," Eshkar said. "So we are going to release in the next 10 years between 500 and 600 animals in the wild until this population is stabilized. 

	"To breed these animals, to take care of the babies, to put a radio collar on them, to bring them north and to release them, is a big effort, but we are very happy to do it because we believe that this is a very important part of the meaning of the modern zoo -- to help nature," he said.
Persian Fallow Deer

The veterinarian said that the story of the Griffin Vulture is a sad one. Many hundreds of breeding pairs were poisoned over the last 50 years as a result of Israeli farmers using pesticides in their fields. "They didn't know that the poison that they put in the fields to kill the rats and the other rodents also would kill the birds which ate the dead rats," he said. 

Earlier this year, a farmer in the Golan Heights was responsible for killing more than 20 of the estimated 150 Griffin Vultures in the area. Wanting to fight the wolves which were attacking his herds, the farmer "put out a dead cow with a lot of poison out," Eshkar said. "A dead cow is good food for these birds of prey but not for wolves. Wolves don't eat (already) dead meat. He didn't kill one wolf, but he killed nearly 25 percent of the population of Griffin Vultures." 

Currently, Jerusalem's Biblical Zoo has one breeding pair of Griffin Vultures and another pair--both adult males--which has been raising a chick together, Eshkar said.   "I think this is the first time in the world that this has happened," he said. "We saw that two males had made a nest. In the wild, the male and female divide the work half and half--each doing 50 percent exactly of the work of sitting on the eggs and raising the baby."So the two males made their nest and we decided to continue their game," Eshkar said.  "We put a small egg into this nest. And they sat

Griffin Vulture

on the egg.Then we took another egg and put a small chick in the egg, and closed it with tape, and they hatched the egg and they are raising it very happily. This is a healthy chick with no complications and he is growing very nice and soon he will be going into the wild. 

"For us it is very important because each time that we can have a healthy chick raised by its own species of Griffin Vulture--no matter that it is by two males--we get another chick to the wild." 

Whenever the Biblical Zoo releases a bird to the wild, it does so with a little ceremony. Two years ago, the Zoo gave the name of "Freedom" to a Griffin Vulture headed for release, and asked the mother of Israeli navigator Ron Arad to release the bird. Arad was captured in Lebanon 12 years ago, and is believed to be held prisoner by either Syrian or Iranian forces. 

A satellite collar was placed on the vulture, Eshkar said, "so we could follow his movement in the sky and I think he made peace much ahead of us because we saw that in one day he flew over Damascus, Jerusalem and Amman. Three main capitals in one day; it was amazing. When you fly high, you see no borders..." 

 * * * 

At the Wild Animal Park, Donald Sterner, lead keeper for the California Condor Project, served as tour guide while Eshkar scrawled handwritten notes from right to left across a tablet. 

Sterner showed Eshkar a trailer in which a bank of closed-circuit televisions monitored every movement of the California Condors in their enclosures. Kristin McCaffree, a research fellow, and two volunteers from the Netherlands kept close watch on the screens for signs of mating behavior. It was a bit early in the season for mating, McCaffree said, but the birds were beginning to "display" -- an early stage in the courting ritual. 

From there, the zoological colleagues went into another trailer where there were three Petersine incubators. "We have to have the incubators set up for eggs running very dry, eggs running on the opposite side of the spectrum--very wet-- and for eggs in the middle," Steiner said. 

As a chick forms inside an egg, the egg loses weight--about 14 percent by the time the chick is ready to hatch. 

In the 55 days between the time the egg is laid and "pip" (the time when the chick can be heard making noises inside the egg), the egg is regularly weighed to see if its progress toward overall 14 percent weight loss is on schedule. 

"We look at what the theoretical weight should be," Steiner said. "If we start seeing a pattern with that egg, if it starts falling behind, then we can take water out. If it losing too much weight, then we add water. So we can make adjustments." 

Steiner's explanation of the process really were for my benefit, as the Israeli veterinarian already was quite familiar with these procedures. But there was some new information in his briefing for Eshkar as well, information that bore on the Griffin Vulture breeding program. 

To avoid weight loss problems in the eggs, Steiner told him, "what we do is leave the eggs with the parents, instead of pulling them fresh. We leave the eggs with the parents for two weeks, 10 to 14 days, then pull them and then we find we have a great deal of flexibility in controlling weight loss. 

"Somehow, they get things going by nature that we aren't able to do," Steiner said. "Then we have plenty of leeway to get them to lose the proper amount of weight." 

Activity in the incubation trailer becomes intense once pipping noises are heard in the egg. A speaker is mounted inside the incubators, and "we play vulture sounds to the chick to stimulate it," Steiner said, explaining condor sounds are not yet available. Additionally, keepers have rigged up a device to periodically make a tap, tap, tapping noise, "to stimulate the little guy to work out." 

The stimulation "gives them a will to come out of there; it gives them hope that mom or something is calling them out there. ...So we do that every couple of hours, what we call 'tape and tap.' In the interval hours, we observe the egg and monitor the activity of the chick, non-stimulated, to see how it is doing in there." 

A veterinarian's examination table in the incubator room drew Eshkar's interest. "If we have to break the chicks out, the vets are here but the keepers do the work," Steiner explained. "But the vets are there in case something happens like bleeding...or the yolk starts hanging out..." 

Next Steiner led Eshkar to another trailer, where newborn chicks can be kept in special isolettes. The cages are screened by thick black curtains, through which keepers may pass food without being seen. To place food in the cage, keepers put condor puppets on their hands--so that the chicks will learn to identify with their own kind. 

To drown out human sounds, "we have a c-d player that plays nature sounds," Steiner said. When the baby condors are more self-sufficient, they are moved to another facility where they are kept with other juvenile condors. For the first time they will be able to see other birds, but still won't be able to see their keepers. 

In the mid 1980s, there were only 22 California Condors throughout the world. Today, thanks to the project at the Wild Animal Park, there are 148 California Condors, 65 of them males, 70 females and 13 whose genders still are to be determined by DNA tests. 

Steiner next drove his jeep to a hill above the Wild Animal Park. Sitting together on a perch were two California Condors, one male, the other female, and both celebrities. 

"The male there is famous because he is the last California Condor to be hatched from an egg taken in the wild and that was back in 1986," Steiner said. "And the female is also very famous because she is the first California condor to be conceived and hatched in captivity, totally captive produced, back in 1988. That was a hatching the entire world heard about because there had been a lot of doubters who said that California Condors would not breed in captivity. Since then, we have had many more, and they had their own now!"