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Baby Orangutan
Arrived: Feb. 7, 2008
Primates of the World
This is a story of an orphan. It began when Mahal the orangutan was born at the CheyenneMountain Zoo in Colorado on April 4, 2007. Orangutans are highly endangered in the wild. An orangutan birth is always good news. Then things went downhill. Mahal’s inexperienced mother failed to care for him. Mahal, born with a foot deformity, went through therapy and wore braces. Things were looking up when he was matched with Sandra, a surrogate orangutan mom. A few weeks later, Sandra died. Mahal was alone again. Although he needed and received 24-hour care from zookeepers, he also needed to socialize with his own kind. The best candidate was MJ, the Milwaukee County Zoo’s 27-year-old female orangutan, who had once served as a surrogate mom at the Toledo Zoo. So Mahal was sent to Milwaukee on a private jet, courtesy of Mary and Terry Kohler of Sheboygan, longtime supporters of conservation programs.
His first day here, the spunky, red-haired ape became a star. Zoogoers oohed; the media aahed. MJ watched from an adjacent exhibit. “She’s looking at him, following him with her eyes,” said primate area supervisor Trish Khan. “MJ wants him pretty badly.” A few days later, Mahal and MJ were placed in the same exhibit. “MJ is very interested in Mahal, but he hasn’t let her pick him up. She can groom him and sit next to him during feeding,” reported zookeeper Dawn Kruger in February. “She’s keeping an eye on him, and he’s keeping an eye on her.” Keepers said MJ and Mahal were getting along well. “She’s the best chance he has,” said Khan. Zookeepers hope that Mahal will pass on a genetic legacy when he’s older. Since the mid-1990s, habitat destruction, fires, palm oil plantations and illegal hunting have drastically cut orangutan numbers in their native South Pacific islands of Borneo and Sumatra.
Red Panda
Arrived: November 26, 2007
Birch Creek Trail, south of Florence Mila Borchert Big Cat Country
Genghis, the Milwaukee County Zoo’s new red panda, can go into his heated den any time he wants.Yet he’s usually cozily curled up on a branch in his outdoor yard even on the coldest days of a Wisconsin winter. In fact, our winters may seem mild to these furry animals that live at altitudes of up to 15,700 feet in the western Chinese provinces of Sichuan andYunnan.
Genghis has thick fur, with hair on the soles of his feet and in between his toes. Although they look like raccoons and eat bamboo like giant pandas, red pandas are not part of the raccoon or giant panda families; they’re in a family all their own: the Ailuridae. Red pandas can survive on the low nutritional value of bamboo because their metabolic rate is very slow, similar to a sloth’s, says zookeeper Robert Collazo, who helps care for Genghis. Red pandas and sloths spend most of their time digesting food and aren’t left with much energy for anything else.
Genghis, age 10, is larger, darker and longer than the Zoo’s previous red pandas. That may be an individual difference or it could be because the others were the sub-species Ailurus fulgens fulgens while he is the sub-species Ailurus fulgens styani. Poaching for their fur and destruction of their bamboo forest homes for cow pasture has made red pandas an endangered species. How many are left in the wild is unknown. So visit Genghis at the Zoo, where you don’t have to climb 15,000 feet.
