Santa Ana Zoo’s Guanaco Population Grows by One

The Santa Ana Zoo has a new baby, a 22-pound guanaco. But don’t get too close. This distant cousin of the llama is a natural-born spitter.

It may be temperamental, but the baby is quite a wonder.

“She’s so cute,” zoo spokeswoman Leslie Perovich said.

The guanaco (gwuh NAH koh) looks like a camel without a hump. A wild wool-bearing animal of South America, it grows to 3 1/2 to 4 feet tall at the shoulder and can live up to 29 years. It can weigh as much as 300 pounds.

It has a cinnamon-brown-colored coat with white undersides and a gray to black face. Guanacos live in groups in the dry foothills of the Andes Mountains in Peru, Chile and Argentina. They live at elevations from sea level to 14,000 feet.

After a gestation period of 11 1/2 months, the female guanaco bears one baby, called a chulengo.

At 9 a.m. Thursday, an hour before the zoo opened, employees noticed that the mother, XuXu, was giving birth. The baby fell a few feet, then got up and immediately began following her mother around.

She ate a little hay, llama pellets, grass, apples and tree branches.

This is the third offspring of 5-year-old XuXu, which brings the guanaco count at the zoo to four.

Perovich said the zoo will name the chulengo sometime next week.