With the aim of stimulating the creation of breeding self-sustaining populations, Valentine’s day has been a good day with the announcement of new couples formed.

As announced a couple of weeks ago, White Rhino Howard left Florida to reach Phoenix Zoo (since he wasn’t able to procreate in his old home) and he finally arrived on 12 February. We hope that the spark could ignite there with the residing female rhino LouLou. Although this news fills our hearth with hope we should be as realistic as possible: infact LouLou is 20 years old and she never had a calf. Moreover a breeding herd formed by a single couple rarely succeed. There are exceptions of course: for example Kayla and Tim in Fresno Chaffee Zoo (California, USA) with 2 calves and Hannah and Oliver in Buin Zoo (Chile). As always this kind of transfer are throughly planned (in this case it tooks 3 years!) because the facility usually have to expand or change the space reserved to rhinos to accomodate the incoming ones and, moreover, the animal has to be accustomated to the cage that will host him during the trip.

Here you an find more information on the transfer.

8 years old Female Maya finally arrived to Fota Wildlife Park (IE) on 23 January from Branféré (FR). According to some sources she was chosen to mate with male Jamil, residing in Fota. It’s not clear why he was chosen since he has a stricter genetic correlation with Maya than Sushto, the other residing bull. To be fair latest studies on Indian Rhinos suggest that there is no consequence in calves vitality due to in-breeding. This being said we can’t do anything than hope for the arrival of a new calf in Cork in a couple of years.

Last but not least we can now confirm the arrival of Eastern Black Rhino Kendi in San Diego Safari Park (USA): the young bull will meet resident young female called Aria. We still do not know the exact arrival date (we are waiting for confirmation). We want to deeply thank our Worldrhino teammat John W. for the precious information.