NEWS
SEPTEMBER
- Monarto Zoo has just received seven giant residents in the form of four female and
three male white rhinos. They arrived by plane from
Johannesburg and will be spending 60 days at the zoo for a quarantine period. After this
five of them will be sent to Western Plains to join the pair already there. Two will
stay at Monarto to form a breeding group with the female
Uhura.
- A tiny wallaby joey, just 14cm long and 92 days old, was rushed to Adelaide Zoo as part
of a
program to save its endangered species. The brush tailed rock wallaby is one of
the most endangered wallaby species with only 10 adults in the wild and seven in
captivity. The little joey was transfered into the pouch of a tammar wallaby where it will be
raised. Joeys are taken from the pouch at this young age so that the mothers will
produce another joey, a process similar to taking eggs from nests.
- Wombats are very difficult to breed in captivity so it was with jubilation
that keepers at Western PLains Zoo discovered three joeys early this year. Even more
exciting is that two are twin, very rare indeed. The young wombats are 10 and 8 months
old.
- Spring has arrived at Adelaide Zoo and with it a spate of births. This
includes a fairy penguin and a Brazillian Tapir, one of the
two species kept at the zoo. (The other is the Malayan Tapir).
The male tapir is the first birth of his species in six years. His parents, Mendes
and Talara have previously produced another male.
Other births include two otters and two meerkats.
- There is a possibilty that Perth Zoos Red Panda may be expecting a cub. The staff are
monitoring the female Rani to see if she is expecting.
- An unexpected birth at Werribee has staff celebrating. On his early morning rounds, Keeper,
Ian Duggan, discovered a
baby white rhino, only an hour old. The mother, Letaba
was one of the females that came from South Africa in 1999. It wasn't even
suspected that she was pregnant. The male calf is the first to be born in Victoria and has
pipped
the Perth Zoo calf by a couple of months,
to be the first born in Australia for twenty years.
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