Caring for 7-Foot Baby Can Be a Bit of a Stretch

When giraffe keeper Steve Tirotta arrived at the Los Angeles Zoo on Labor Day morning, he knew Asali was about to give birth. It had been more than 14 months since she had become pregnant. And her calf’s front feet were already protruding from the birth canal of the towering mother-to-be.

For the next two hours, Tirotta and a privileged group of keepers kept a vigil in the barn attached to the giraffe exhibit.

The barn is the kind of nondescript, back-of-the-exhibit building that most zoo visitors never see. But it served as the backdrop for the giraffe drama.

Asali, a 21-year-old Masai giraffe born wild in Africa, walked around the hay-covered barn as if nothing momentous was about to happen.

Tirotta gave her fresh acacia to munch on and practiced using a video camera he had borrowed to record the baby giraffe’s birth -- his first.

Tirotta couldn’t get over how relaxed Asali was: “She was like ‘I’m having my baby, I’m eating my breakfast, I’m checking out the camera.’ Then, she just dropped the calf right in front of us.... He hit the ground at 10:20” in the morning.

The baby boy was unharmed by his plunge onto the hay; some experts think the 6-foot drop helps regulate the heart and facilitates breathing.

On Wednesday, the rambunctious infant was introduced to the public at a news conference at the zoo’s nursery.

Already 7 feet tall, the unnamed youngster has been gaining about three pounds a day and now weighs 200 pounds.

There are only about 70 Masai giraffes in North America, and a significant number were fathered by a single male, the L.A. Zoo’s 24-year-old bull, Kito. Asali has had about 10 calves sired by Kito.

But three years ago, a young male Masai named Artimus was shipped from the San Diego Zoo and Wild Animal Park in hopes that he would mate with Asali and infuse fresh genes into the American Masai population. L.A.’s tall new baby boy is the first calf for 8-year-old Artimus.

“He drools,” Kelley Greene says fondly of the gangly newborn.

Greene, the lead animal keeper in the nursery, gives the infant the first of his six daily bottles around 9 a.m. Each bottle holds 1 3/4 quarts of cow’s milk, supplemented with vitamins, calcium and other nutrients.

“You’re a spunky boy,” she coos as the big baby kicks up the hay that covers the floor of his nursery.

At night, a faint overhead light allows the infant to move confidently on his long new legs when he isn’t napping.

During the day, he strides around an outdoor area dotted with trees, built specially for young hoof stock.

“He’s a healthy, strapping baby,” says Greene. “He wants to fling his legs around and play.”

The giraffe is being raised by humans in the nursery because Asali has what Greene describes as “a casual mothering style.” Asali successfully nursed her first calf but not her second.

Zoo personnel don’t know if there is some problem with her milk, but they have observed that she is not an especially attentive mother.

Tirotta described her as lacking maternal “fervor.”

Minutes after the baby was born, the keepers and nursery staff tried to get him to take a bottle filled with colostrum, the rich fluid new mothers produce right after giving birth.

The zoo staff had high-quality cow colostrum on hand and knew the infant needed it to develop a vigorous immune system.

But getting a newborn giraffe to nurse can be tricky, especially when he is being offered a plastic nipple instead of a mother’s teat.

“You can’t just muscle them down and stick it in their mouth,” Greene says.

“They have to get excited about nursing.”

In an ideal world, the newborn giraffe is standing in the dark shadow of a hovering mother and, as the mother brushes encouragingly against the infant, he finds the teat and begins to nurse.

Greene had to find a way to give the newborn the sense that he was in a safe, darkened place where he would find sustenance.

The calf hadn’t yet got on his feet, so Greene hovered over him, her face next to his, nuzzling him and gently rubbing her hands over his back and touching his face -- while offering him the bottle of colostrum.

“Within 10 minutes, she had him swilling it down,” says Tirotta, who found himself tearing up during the process. “He took a full liter.”

Greene once managed to get a standing newborn giraffe to suckle by stimulating the infant’s face with a curly wig.

Another time, a newborn took a bottle after Greene got up on a ladder (she is 5 feet tall), and made a little tent out of an umbrella covered with a towel.

Once both she and the newborn were underneath, he accepted the bottle.

But this time was easy: “No curly wigs or umbrellas for this guy,” she says. “He just needs your face.”

The zoo has not yet settled on a name for the baby.

But Tirotta and his colleagues have followed tradition and given the month-old giraffe a Swahili name -- Damani, the name of the brother of one of their colleagues at the zoo. It means “thoughtful,” and the staff is already using the name in-house.

As to what lies ahead for the zoo’s giraffes, in the main compound, yards from the barn where the new baby was born, Artimus has recently been seen mounting both Asali and Neema, who is newly off contraceptives.

As Tirotta reports, “Love is in the air.”