I get a newsletter from the National Zoo

And today's announced the birth of the 50th kori bustard chick born to the zoo. Kori bustard? I know a lot of animals, and this sounded like a bird, but it was not familiar. The kori bustard is a native of Africa. There are two subspecies. They are the heaviest bird capable of flight, although are considered terrestrial. Here is an adult kori bustard:

[image credit: Frank Wouters, an excellent photographer, judging by his Flickr photostream, licensed under Creative Commons]

Impressive plumage, eh? Now I got to this because I wanted to see an adult, because the baby is utterly adorable:

[I'm not sure which National Zoological Park photographer took that photo--it's from: National Zoo’s 50th Kori Bustard Chick Hatches]

It's about the size of a human hand. It'll get significantly bigger. They're raising the chick by hand for now but expect it to be on display by mid-August. :) So if you're in the DC area after that, check out the newest addition.

For more on the kori bustard, see the Wikipedia article or the National Zoo's fact sheet.

So cute!

Check out the lion cam at the National Zoo

They had four cubs born a few days ago and while they're inside with their mum over the next few weeks, there's a camera so you can watch them. Right now, for example, the cubs are nursing, not surprisingly.

I found out about the webcam from Baby Lion Cub Live Webcam Launched from Wired magazine.

I haven't figured out how to view it in Firefox (the plugin for Windows Media Player doesn't seem to exist for WMP 12, which I'm running on a Windows 7 x64 version sytem, so that's an issue), but I could view it in IE8. Let me know if you have Firefox on a Windows 7 machine and know where there's a plugin I could download. Thanks!

PS There are a lot of webcams at the National Zoo, so if you're interested in watching other animals there, be sure to follow this link: http://nationalzoo.si.edu/animals/webcams/.