Visiting zoos’ newest members can be aww-inspiring

Zoo babies make my hard heart soften. It’s partly hope and joy inspired by seeing the offspring of some of the world’s most endangered species, and partly wonder at the familiar mother-child relationship played out among creatures that seem outlandish compared with humans. For all these reasons, I’m drawn to babies when I visit zoos during my travels -- from the pink flamingo-crowded aviary at Hong Kong’s Kowloon Park to the Audubon Zoo in New Orleans, with its atmospheric Louisiana Swamp exhibit that’s home to gators and more.

There are baby animals to watch and love at the San Diego Zoo: two infant Visayan warty pigs, native to the Philippines, and a little male gorilla, born last summer. The San Diego Zoo’s Wild Animal Park in Escondido has more youngsters: giraffes, a Przewalski’s horse (a wild Mongolian steed once near extinction), an African buffalo and a little white rhino that weighed 125 pounds when born in November.

Closer to home, at the Los Angeles Zoo, there are 3-week-old twin maned wolves, a highly endangered species from South America. One is being raised by its mom and the other in a nursery because it’s underweight and has a cold. Both are expected to be on display later this month.

Of all the places where I’ve visited animals, the Smithsonian National Zoological Park in Washington, D.C., is my favorite. It’s easy to reach (you can get there by Metro), and it has all the requisite lions and tigers and bears. It also has Mei Xiang and Tian Tian, a pair of giant pandas on loan from China.

The babies were the stars of the show when I was last there late last year. I was especially taken with the Asian elephant calf Kandula, who weighed 325 pounds when he was born Nov. 25, 2001. This endearing little Dumbo has grown to 1,085 pounds of elephantine rambunctiousness. He plays hide-and-seek with his mother and trumpets so loudly that it scares the brown blotches off the young giraffe in the pen next door.

I could have spent hours watching Kandula. “Some days it’s like being around any toddler,” says Deborah Flinkman, an elephant keeper at the National Zoo. “He’s into everything.” She admits she has as many pictures of the elephant on her refrigerator as she does of her 5-year-old nephew.

Kandula plays with balls and spare tires, practices trumpeting in the wee hours of the morning, swims like a fish in warm weather, throws the occasional temper tantrum and is growing increasingly independent, Flinkman says. His thrice-daily meals consist of grain pellets mixed with produce, though he’s still nursing and probably will be for the next year (more for comfort than nutrition). He steals tidbits from his 9,400-pound mother, Shanthi, using his trunk to scoop them out of her bucket and then running away. (Flinkman thinks he wants to know what Mom has that he doesn’t.)

Kandula’s birth was carefully planned, though no less miraculous for it. Shanthi was inseminated with sperm from a bull elephant in a Canadian zoo. She was closely monitored during her two-year pregnancy, standing unperturbed as blood samples were taken daily. An endocrinologist predicted the onset of labor by measuring hormone levels in the samples. Flinkman and her colleagues were equipped with baby pagers and trained to assist Shanthi in the same way members of elephant herds help birthing mothers in the wild, partly by seeing to it that the baby stood up as soon as possible. When Kandula appeared, he was weighed, examined and helped to his feet in a matter of minutes.

Kandula’s emergence was strikingly different from that of the National Zoo’s beloved baby Kojo, a lowland gorilla native to the tropical forests of West and Central Africa. The ape was so small and closely attached to his mother, Mandara, when he was born Nov. 5, 2001, that it took several months for zookeepers to determine the infant’s sex. This is because the mother “gave birth in the family group, with all the members around,” says Lisa Stevens, assistant curator for primates and pandas at the National Zoo. “We were not present. She didn’t need our assistance. Mandara is an experienced mother. Kojo is her fifth infant.”

Kojo, who weighs about 15 pounds, is beginning to interact with his family group, Stevens says. Besides Kojo, his family consists of Mandara, father Kuja (a 19-year-old male silverback gorilla) and siblings Baraka, Ktembe and Kwame.

Mother is on birth control so she doesn’t get pregnant again by Kuja. Instead, curators want to try to mate her with Mopi, a 30-year-old male who hasn’t yet bred with any of the zoo’s female gorillas.

Stevens rejects comparisons between animals and humans. But to me, the National Zoo ape house sounds like a daytime soap.

I don’t know why we tend to anthropomorphize elephants and gorillas and other zoo babies. But if there’s empathy in it, it can’t be all bad.

Los Angeles Zoo, 5333 Zoo Drive; (323) 644-6400, www.lazoo.org.

San Diego Wild Animal Park, 15500 San Pasqual Valley Road, Escondido, CA, (760) 747-8702, and San Diego Zoo, Balboa Park, San Diego, CA, (619) 234- 3153; www.sandiegozoo.org.

Smithsonian National Zoological Park, 3001 Connecticut Ave. N.W., Washington, DC; (202) 673-4800, www.nationalzoo.si.edu.