Zookeepers help raise baby aardvark

Added: 2026-05-25

[00:00:00]I was very excited.

[00:00:03]Um, some of the team were here when we had our last aardvark calf. So, it's still very exciting. It was still, I think for the whole team, a a big achievement. For me in particular, I wasn't here for the last one. So, this was a very exciting time for me.

[00:00:18]Um, I was lucky enough to be the one that found Wombat on the day that they were born. And I definitely squealed a little bit and did a little jump up and down.

[00:00:28]We quickly noticed that the calf wasn't putting on as much weight each day as we would expect, certainly compared to um, other zoos that have had um, successful aardvark calves. We were sort of chatting to them about how much weight their calves were putting on.

[00:00:44]Um, and in comparison, ours just wasn't really going up each day. So, at that point, we decided we needed to um, yeah, just be a little bit more hands-on. So, we let the calf stay with mom sort of all all during the day. Um, and every sort of few hours we were then just supplement feeding with um, some supplement milk as well just to basically top it up and make sure that it was getting everything it needed to to grow.