Chester Zoo is hand-rearing the newborn animal.
Chester zoo of the United Kingdom has witnessed the birth of an aardvark calf for the first time in 90 years. Staff at the Chester Zoo in Cheshire have named the animal Dobby after the Harry Potter character who resembles a newborn’s hairless wrinkled skin and dangling ears.
Aardvark was born on January 4, 2022, but its sex was recently determined. On Friday, Chester Zoo tweeted that Dobby is a girl, much to the excitement of animal lovers. One person tweeted, ‘Can’t wait to meet Dobby soon.
Currently, Dobby is being hand-reared by the experts at Chester Zoo. On its website, the zoo reports that aardvarks are “notorious for being a little clumsy around their newborns”. Therefore, to protect the newborn from accidental harm to the mother, the zoo supports the baby “with complementary feeding sessions throughout the night, until the calf gets a little stronger”.
Team manager, Dave White, at Chester Zoo, elaborates, “In the evenings when the parents are exploring and feeding, we carefully place the calf in a special incubator and feed it with warm milk every few hours. take it home. The calf then spends the day and stays with Mother Oni inside her burrow – and the two of them are doing great together.
Aardvarks are native to sub-Saharan Africa, are rarely found in zoos. According to the Chester Zoo, across Europe, there are only 66 aardvarks in zoos. Due to human encroachment of wild habitats and frequent hunting, aardvark populations in the wild are declining.