L.A. Zoo’s nursery is hopping (and crawling, and flapping) with baby animals

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The L.A. Zoo has seen a spate of births recently, from the peninsular pronghorns and Speke’s gazelles to the red river hogs (the watermelon-resembling creatures above, which are ‘like big puppies,’ according to zoo veterinarian Curtis Eng). Our colleague Carla Hall has the details on the newborns:

Across the zoo, babies of different species are toddling, waddling, and jumping in pens and yards and stalls. A giraffe was born in April and another is expected any day. There are two Chacoan peccaries, a type of pig from South America, and a Japanese serow, a rare goat-antelope. A Mexican lance-headed rattlesnake, less than a month old, won’t go on display until the zoo’s new reptile house opens in 2011. But visitors can see a month-old gerenuk already standing straight up on outstretched slender legs as he browsed for leafy vegetation in a yard in the zoo’s nursery.

Most hoof stock deliver in the spring, zoo staffers said. The nursery is full of babies being hand-reared because they are recovering from illnesses or their mothers can’t do the job.

Also new at the zoo, Hall reports, are two greater flamingo chicks, with a third (probably) on the way. (Flamingo eggs often fail to hatch, for a variety of reasons.) For more on the zoo’s newest additions, check out Hall’s story and its accompanying photo gallery.

-- Lindsay Barnett