Awww...Binder Park Zoo introduces newest baby animals

Kathy Jennings | Thursday, July 17, 2014

Here at Second Wave we cover what's new and what's next--usually new businesses, new ideas that are making the community a better place to live, new innovations that are changing the way work gets done. Today we take a short break from that to cover what's new in the animal world. Specifically, the too cute new babies at Binder Park Zoo in Battle Creek.

The cutest of the bunch has to be a baby black mangabey monkey, named Chekelea (smile in Swahili), born May 1 to Sunniva. The birth of the baby brings the troop of black mangabey monkeys to four. Mangabeys are some of the rarest monkey species in the world.

Two new baby giraffes born this summer also are being exhibited for the first time at the zoo. Kitovu, a female baby, born June 12 and Hulka, a male giraffe born June 16 can both be seen at the zoo's Wild Africa exhibit. Kitovu (belly button in Swahili) weighed 104.5 pounds when she was born and she is the second calf for her mother, Kayin. Hulka (meaning nature) was 159 pounds at birth, the largest of the giraffe calves born at Binder Park Zoo.

By design, in the first 10 years of the Wild Africa exhibit there were no giraffes born at the zoo. The first baby giraffe was born there in 2009. Binder Park Zoo was holding two male giraffes from the Columbus Zoo and they went back to Columbus in 2013, so the zoo did more planned breeding of its giraffe group. Ideally, the zoo can accommodate a maximum of nine to 10 giraffes. With the new babies it now has eight.

The new male baby giraffe and his mother, Makena, are owned by the Columbus Zoo through a breeding loan agreement. The young female, who cannot breed with her father, may be kept for exhibit or may be traded to another zoo for an unrelated female.

"It can get very complicated and there is a lot of science behind who breeds with who," says the zoo's director of Conservation and Wildlife Management. "We try to do what is best for the species and the individual animals."

The baby giraffes are not yet tall enough to be take lettuce from the hands of zoo visitors on the feeding platform as their parents are.

Rounding out the cuteness collection are two guinea hogs now on exhibit in Wild Africa. Twiglet and Rosebud--are one-year-olds from the Scovill Zoo in Illinois. Their species originates from the country of Guinea, in western Africa, and is now found in many parts of the world as a domestic breed.

Binder Park Zoo is located outside of Battle Creek, Michigan on 433 acres of natural forests and wetlands. In the past 38 years, the Zoo has grown to be one of the leading cultural attractions in the region.

Source: Kari Parker, Binder Park Zoo