Baby stork arrives at Lincoln Park Zoo to be raised by foster birds

CHICAGO (WLS) -- At Lincoln Park Zoo, a new baby stork has arrived. But it didn't fly in. It arrived by car from Detroit.

It's Chicago's version of New York's Old Stork Club just show up at Lincoln Park Zoo, visit the Birds of Prey exhibit and you're a member. A month-old white stork chick is now on exhibit, and even though many other storks have hatched here over the years, this chick is totally different.

"We're pretty excited about this chick. The parents are not the actual parents of this chick. We were able to get the egg from another zoo, and so the parents are foster raising this chick," said Sunny Nelson, curator of birds.

Jethro, 20, is the father. He and 13-year-old Cheyanne have hatched out nine little storks. But this year their eggs were infertile. So staffers located a fertile egg at the Detroit Zoo.

"So the keepers there grabbed the egg, put it in the incubator... We drove there and picked it up... drove here and put it under the parents in their nest," Nelson said.

The infertile eggs were removed from the nest and replaced with dummy eggs. The fertile egg was added to the clutch. The adults smothered the eggs with warmth and love - and presto - a chick was hatched, and it's growing fast.

"When it first hatched out, the chick weighed about an ounce and a half. And now it's up to about two pounds," Nelson said.

The chick is a month old, and so far the zoo doesn't know if it's a boy or a girl. But they are determined to find out soon.

"We will pull out a couple of feathers from the chick... send them out to the lab and they'll send us the results and let us know if it's a boy or a girl," Nelson said. "We can look, but it has to be much older... We want to know now."

So if storks deliver babies, who delivers storks? The obvious answer here - a car from the Detroit Zoo.