Two more rhinos arrive in 2020! They are two Southern White ones curiously born the same day, Thursday 16 January 2020.
Arnhem – Burger Zoo (NL) welcomed another Southern White rhino calf. Mom Kwanzaa, 20 years old, gave birth to her seventh calf withouth complications and Europe mantains its current streak of males. The little boy has not been named yes: his name will probably be choose by the keepers as usual and we will update our much loved table of baby rhinos born in 2020. The facility now hosts 8 rhinos: apart mom and calf there are dad Gilou, Kwanza’s previous calf Naomi, female Gingabelle, mom Izala with Diederik and his older sister Wiesje. Kwanzaa is one of the few female in Europe that is currently able to produce calves with a certain regularity: since 2010 she gave birth once every two years with the shortest inter-birth period between the last two; in fact between Naomi and this last one only 18-19 months passed, a very short span of time.
The second baby rhino is a birth: she was born to experienced mom Kidogo at Tampa’s Lowry (Florida, USA). This unnamed girl is the fifth calf for the experienced mom (and the second with bull Ongava). Thanks to our teammate Robyn we knew that good news were on the way but we needed to wait for the news to become public before publishing the article here. The girl looks healthy and lively: we will wait to know her name soon. “Rhino things” are going very well in this zoo with another calf born in 2018 to the other breeding female called Alake: it is really good to have two females producing calves in an herd of rhinos in a single zoo. It’s a success because it means that there’s a good behavioural balance between the females: however there’s another adult female in the facility called Fujo that has never produced a calf. We hope that in the near future she could be moved to another facility because she could have an estrous suppression due to the dominance of the other females.
We hope to hear soon about more calves expecially from Europe because, as many of you know, last year there were less birthes than usual.
