Rare bird flies back from the dead

The future of a rare species of bird that was once thought to be extinct got a huge lift this month when a chick was born at a zoo in south China's Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region.

Without feathers and barely able to walk, the 30-gram pink bird, a white-eared night-heron, is eating four small fish every one and a half hours and making great progress since it broke out of its shell on May 3 at Nanning Zoo, Nanning Evening News reported on Friday.

The bird was hatched in an incubator and is being fed artificially but is 100 per cent real - one of only a handful of the species on the planet.