Baby vulture gets food with hand puppet - magical video shows "foster mother"

Because baby vulture Viktor grows up without mom and dad, he gets his food with a hand puppet.

Dortmund Zoo shows the special “foster mother” in an enchanting video.

Dortmund (NRW) – Most people probably still know hand puppets from the Punch and Judy show from childhood.

Dortmund Zoo proves that the figures are also useful for raising animals with an enchanting video of the king vulture chick Viktor.

Because the baby vulture is sometimes a bit fussy when it comes to eating and doesn't always empty its plate.

Time for Trick 17: A hand puppet as a "foster mother".

Baby vulture gets food with hand puppet - magical video shows "foster mother"

The Dortmund Zoo shares the video of the lunch together on Facebook.

In the leading roles: baby vulture Viktor and his “foster mother” aka animal keeper Daniel Herken, who puts the doll over his fingers like a glove.

Usually the chick has a healthy appetite.

But the clip also shows that Viktor sometimes forgets to eat.

"Sometimes we have to encourage him to use the king vulture hand puppet to empty his plate a little bit by handing the pieces of meat directly to his beak or by tapping on the shell," explains the zoo.

With this simple but effective camouflage, the two-and-a-half-month-old bird of prey is not imprinted too much on humans.

Keepers at Chester Zoo provide extra feeding time when raising baby aardvark Dobby.

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A hand puppet helps baby vulture Viktor grow big and strong.

© Facebook (Dortmund Zoo)

Baby vulture gets food with a hand puppet - the principle is similar to natural food intake

The principle with the hand puppet is also similar to natural feeding when the parent animals are raising their offspring.

"While the parent birds initially feed their offspring directly with their beaks, they later only place the food in front of the chicks, where the chicks then help themselves, but occasionally need a little help," describes the Dortmund Zoo.

However, little Viktor never got to know mum and dad because the king vulture couple had already damaged their clutches several times in the zoo.

Therefore, the decision for the team was quickly made: Viktor's egg will be incubated with an incubator and the chick will then be reared by hand.

There are also two new bearded vultures from Andalusia in the Berchtesgaden National Park.

Baby vulture gets food with hand puppet - pieces of meat are mixed with enzymes

But there is still one problem: Normally, the parental birds of prey pre-digest the food for their chicks and regurgitate the meat pulp from the crop.

"As a result, the pre-digested food is already provided with digestive enzymes that initiate digestion in the young animal," says the zoo.

Of course, that doesn't work with the hand puppet.

But the team has a solution for this as well: In order not to burden the baby vulture's sensitive digestion, the animal keepers place the pieces of meat in a special mixture for a few minutes beforehand.

This already contains the required enzymes.

Little Viktor tastes the food wonderfully, even with a hand puppet - and soon grows into a strong king vulture.

List of rubrics: © Facebook (Dortmund Zoo)