Warthog Baby

The Many Babies of 2016!

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The end of the year is always a time of taking stock. It’s a chance to take a breath and get reorganized after the hustle and bustle of summer. That makes it the perfect time to step back and reflect on the ever-growing, ever-evolving conservation breeding program here at Safari West.

Each year our keepers work diligently and endlessly, not just to keep our animals healthy and happy, but to ensure that their lives are as naturalistic as possible. There is a very straightforward motivation driving this goal. When animals are allowed to live out their natural behaviors, those behaviors tend to include courtship and breeding, and that is something we very much want. Safari West is and always has been a conservation breeding facility. Our mission is based on the never-ending work of keeping the most vulnerable species in existence alive and genetically viable.

In the case of critically endangered species like the addax or the Waldrapp’s ibis, this work is incredibly important simply to keep the species’ numbers up. As a useful side-effect, captive born animals breeding in captivity preclude the need to go out and capture wild specimens.

This, of course, leads to the question so often asked of why we need captive animals in the first place. First of all, captive populations can and do serve as reserve populations in the case of the extinction of their wild cousins. We’ve seen this in action with the scimitar horned oryx; an antelope that was hunted to extinction in the late 1980’s. Since some specimens had been captured and a successful captive breeding program developed, the species survived even though there have been none outside of human care for nearly thirty years. In March of 2016, an ambitious scimitar horned oryx reintroduction project was initiated that is even now working to re-wild hundreds of descendants of those once-captured scimitar ancestors.

The other reason why it’s important to have captive specimens in properly run and accredited zoos and wildlife parks is because of the well-documented tendency of humans to only protect the creatures and places we’re familiar with. It is doubtful that the world would’ve worked as hard as it has to preserve the giant panda if the creature had remained unknown to all but the Chinese who live in the panda’s native range. There is something about a face-to-face encounter with a polar bear, an elephant, a giraffe, or a cheetah that inspires compassion and dedication in our species.

There is a famous quote that comes up frequently here at Safari West. It comes from Senegalese forestry engineer Baba Dioum in a paper he presented to the International Union on the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) in 1968.

“In the end, we will conserve only what we love, we will love only what we understand, and we will understand only what we are taught.”

It is the role of facilities like Safari West to be educators and leaders in the field of wildlife conservation. Everyday we strive to inspire that so-critical passion and understanding even as we work to advance and refine our captive breeding programs.

The year, 2016 has been fantastic for many of our programs. Among our famously reproductive species, we had a banner year. We saw seven new wildebeest and even more cape buffalo. The serval cats had another litter of kittens and the southern screamers (South American water birds) came in with eight downy hatchlings.

Speaking of birds, they ran away with it this year. Between the American and African greater flamingos, we had a whopping fourteen gray, puffball babies. Though they’ve already grown to the size of their parents, their famous pink coloration is only just starting to come in. The newly renovated Amani Oasis Aviary proved particularly productive and this spring we were inundated with a variety of ducklings, pigeon chicks, and both African and roseate spoonbill babies. While our scarlet ibises nested en masse, as usual, they didn’t even come close to the sacred ibises that together hatched seventeen youngsters!

Among our more endangered species, we had exciting reproductive successes as well. Our critically endangered addax antelope and dama gazelles produced four and two babies respectively. We also greeted six newborn Nile lechwe.

Some of our happiest moments came with the births of three new giraffes; each of whom made the news. Nikki, Dubs, and TJ are all around a year old now and growing taller by the day.

Finally, we experienced success with species we haven’t seen reproduce successfully before. Safari West is currently home to four thriving warthog piglets who, other than the fact that their tusks haven’t come in yet, are the spitting image of their piggy parents. We also have two reclusive striped hyena cubs tucked away behind the scenes. Timid and shy animals, the arrival of these two babies marked a huge step in our hyena breeding program.

As we look forward to 2017 we expect to see similar results from a number of our species. We also have some high hopes for a few other programs. Our critically endangered Waldrapp ibises have never successfully reproduced here but our flock increased in size this year and there’s a chance that these colony nesters will feel more at home with their greater numbers and make 2017 another year of firsts. Likewise, our long single hamerkop—a fascinating bird explored in this month’s Safari Spotlight—was recently introduced to a potential mate. They’ve been seen spending a great deal of time together in and on the massive nest these birds are famous for. Will we see baby hamerkops next year? Only time will tell.

At Safari West, we’re very proud of our conservation breeding programs. The work is rewarding and the results are often adorable as well as being important to the work of conservation. In the upcoming year, please accept our invitation to come out on safari with us. These creatures, whether babies or adults, are fascinating and vulnerable pieces of our world and we should all take the time to know them better.