On the morning of April 12, 2026, a chick barely bigger than a walnut chipped its way out of an egg at a wooded conservation campus in Front Royal, Virginia. Two days later, another followed. Then, at the end of May, two more — one on the 27th, one on the 28th. Four hatchlings in a single spring, from parents who had never managed it before.
The chicks are sihek, better known as Guam kingfishers: cinnamon-orange birds with electric-blue wings, about nine inches long and weighing roughly as much as a tennis ball. They are also one of the rarest birds on Earth. The sihek has been classified as extinct in the wild since 1988, and only about 125 of them are alive anywhere on the planet, all of them in human care or on one remote Pacific atoll.
The pair that finally got along
The parents are Poki, age 2, and Antonio, age 5, both first-time breeders at the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute. Getting them to that point took patience. "Caring for Guam sihek can be quite challenging at times," aviculturist Erica Royer, who is looking after the chicks, told Smithsonian magazine. "They are a territorial little bird, so the pairs can be difficult to breed." Poki and Antonio reportedly did not get along well enough to nest last year. This season, keepers incubated and hand-turned the real eggs while letting the inexperienced pair practice on plaster-filled dummy eggs. The hatchlings now need feeding seven times a day.
Four chicks in one season ties the facility's record, set in 2020 and again back in 1985. Thirty-three sihek have now hatched at the institute over the decades. In an editors' note dated July 6, Smithsonian magazine reported that the Smithsonian's National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute now has six sihek chicks, and that Royer says all are in good health.
Because Poki and Antonio's genes are poorly represented in the tiny global population, their offspring are unusually important. "Given the small size of the worldwide population of sihek, every additional individual is incredibly valuable," Megan Laut, a wildlife biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, told Smithsonian magazine. Kayla Baker, a senior bird conservation specialist with the Nature Conservancy and the Zoological Society of London, called the hatchlings "particularly exciting," saying the infusion of genetic diversity could ease problems like inbreeding depression and disease.
Why every egg counts
The sihek vanished from Guam after brown tree snakes arrived on the island, most likely stowed away in cargo after World War II. With no predators to check them, the snakes wiped ten of Guam's twelve native forest bird species from the wild. Biologists rescued the last few dozen sihek in the 1980s; every bird alive today descends from them. For the Indigenous CHamoru people, the bird's loss cut away a piece of the island's identity.
The comeback is already underway elsewhere. Nine sihek — five males, four females — were released in September 2024 on predator-free Palmyra Atoll, about 1,000 miles south of Hawai'i, and all nine were still accounted for past the one-year mark. They laid the species' first wild eggs in nearly 40 years in March 2025; none hatched, which the Fish and Wildlife Service attributed to inexperience. Another nine birds are slated for Palmyra in late 2026 or early 2027.
"We are hopeful that we'll soon have our first wild chick in almost 40 years," said John Ewen of the Zoological Society of London's Institute of Zoology. Four small birds in Virginia just made that day a little more likely.
