11/10/2022 0 Comments Baby gorillaAnd on Monday, Calaya was cradling and nursing the baby appropriately, Bastian said.Īs for Baraka, “he has an extremely playful side,” Brown said. “So she knows what it means to kiss her baby, to touch her baby and to feed her baby,” Brown said recently. “She’s very new at this,” Brown said.īut Brown has done maternal training with her using a stuffed gorilla toy standing in for her baby. Keepers were not sure how Calaya would react to her baby. This was in 2015, while she was still on birth control, but it was promising for the future. “It was a very smooth introduction,” she said. She said keepers decided to introduce her to him first. “We’re pretty certain that Baraka was taken by her, just based on his behaviors,” Malinsky said. “It was love at first sight,” she said.Įven before they met, when he could only gaze at her from behind the glass of the enclosure where she was temporarily quarantined, she caught his eye. The zoo verified that using a standard human pregnancy test.Ĭalaya and Baraka hit it off right away, Malinsky said recently, and they mated within an hour of meeting. Unlike their powerful parents, newborns are tiny, weighing 4 lb (1. Female gorillas do not show signs of pregnancy. “Once we were certain her health was in the perfect state to have a pregnancy, we took her off birth-control pills.” Female gorillas give birth to one infant after a gestation period of nearly nine months. “We let her come and get acclimated to the group, kind of figure out what her position would be,” Melba Brown, her chief trainer, said recently. Officials said they were not sure when it would reopen.Ĭalaya was initially on birth-control pills when she arrived at the zoo in 2015 from Seattle’s Woodland Park Zoo. A gorilla’s gestation period is 71/2 to eight months. Calaya weighs about 205 pounds and is the dominant female in her group. The two adult gorillas have been a power couple since Calaya arrived three years ago.īaraka is 26. He looks strong and healthy, Bastian said: “He’s vocal already. The baby’s male sex was confirmed Monday morning. He “stayed in the room with her, but was at a respectful distance,” Bastian said. She would use them to brace herself a little bit as she was pushing.”īaraka, the father, is a hulking “silverback,” so called because of the gray hair on his broad back. “She was doing a lot of pacing and walking around,” she said. Video footage shows Calaya cradling him in her huge hands and cleaning him seconds after he was born.īastian said the staff watched as Calaya’s birth contractions became more frequent, and she picked up a blanket at several points, as if for help. The baby, the first such gorilla born at the zoo in nine years, arrived at 6:25 p.m.
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