January 11, 2006
By Rose Setshoge
THE New Year brought a host of new babies to the Johannesburg Zoo when five Hottentots teals hatched on 1 January and a single purple-crested turaco hatched less than a week later.
Unfortunately one of the Hottentots teal chicks died while still in the brooder room. The other chicks have been moved to an aviary. Born on 6 January, the purple-crested turaco is being hand-raised in the brooder room.
Sharing a birthday with the turaco is a male sitatunga. The newborn antelope is kept in the enclosure with its parents and 10 other sitatungas - in total there are now four males and nine females.
According to Piet Malepa, one of the zoo's hoofstocks keepers, sitatungas are found in east Africa. They are reddish-brown in colour and have white stripes all over their bodies and spots on their faces and thighs.
They look like bushbuck and prefer vegetated swamps.
There are now three purple-crested turacos at the zoo. The newborn is fed on a mixture of green plants and floating pellets, while the Hottentots teals eat Purity baby food, fruit yoghurt, mashed banana and Avi-plus cereal.
"We have to take blood samples to discover the gender of the birds, which will be done later when they are bigger," said Mike Herman, a senior curator in the zoo's bird department.
Turacos normally lay two eggs, a day apart, and the incubation period is 21 to 24 days.
The Hottentots teal is the smallest duck in Africa. The female is a much lighter colour on her underside than the male, but they both have blue-grey feet, a brown-spotted breast, a black head and green on their wings.
Found in eastern and southern Africa and Madagascar, the Hottentots teal lives in freshwater marshes, inland waters and flood plains and eats insects, crustaceans, seeds and vegetables.
The female normally lays between five and nine eggs, and the incubation period is 22 to 26 days. The ducklings learn to fly after five weeks.
More births are expected in the near future, while the lion cubs are old enough for public appearances. "One giraffe is heavily pregnant and is expected to give birth in February," Malepa said.
The lion cubs, a female called Annie and a male called Oliver, are two months old already and have been introduced to the public. Annie weighs 300 kilograms; Oliver is a bit smaller at 220 kilograms.
"They feed on milk and fish and are still being hand-raised," said Cherry van der Walt, the carnivore curator. "They bite and use their sharp claws very well."
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