Meet 7 giraffes at Brevard Zoo

Herd eats about 1,000 pieces of mixed veggies at zoo each day

MELBOURNE, Fla. – In this edition of "What does it take?" we went south of Orlando near the coast to Melbourne on a quest to observe the nightly routine of the African habitat at the Brevard Zoo.

The 20,000-square-foot habitat holds every animal from the giraffe to the meerkat. News 6 got an up-close look at the nightly routine of one of the tallest animals on Earth: the giraffe.                

The nightly routine

Zookeeper Rebecca Hannah guided the behind the scenes look into the process of bringing each giraffe in. The first giraffe keepers let into the barn for the night was 18-year-old Rafiki who stands just under 17 feet tall and weighs 2,700 pounds.

“He is definitely the most charismatic of all of your giraffes,” Hannah said.

[Click on each icon below to explore more of the giraffe habitat in this 360 interactive image]

There is a process to bringing in all of the animals into the barn each night from the expedition African exhibit.

“So usually we give ourselves an hour and a half total to bring all the animals in,” Hannah said.

The giraffes usually take only five minutes to come in for the day.

However, the rhinos can take a bit of convincing.

“The rhinos take anywhere between 10 minutes to an hour. Sometimes several hours, if they don’t want to cooperate,” Hannah said.

The rhinos move from their exhibit through the giraffe yard to get into the barn each evening, but most nights it doesn’t take them long to come in for the night.

South Africa’s national bird the Stanley crane is also housed in the barn each night.

Rafiki is one of the males in the habitat that breeds with other females Johari and Mileena.

He has sired all nine babies that have been born at the zoo. He and the other six giraffes are all Masai species giraffes.

Female Kumi came to the Brevard Zoo from the San Diego Zoo early last year, Hannah said.

Doc is the other adult male that is a hybrid of reticulated Rothschild.

The youngest calves are named Twelve and Greg.

So what does their diet consist of?

The giraffes have a varied diet and can eat alfalfa hay to sweet potatoes, but their diet consists of branches for roughage for digestion including leaves and bark that they would find in the wild.

“Every day we cut down branches and give them two to three branches per giraffe every single night, so they get that natural foraging behavior, stripping the bark and leaves and such,” Hannah said.

In addition to, the hay and branches each adult giraffe receives between 16 to 22 pounds of grain pellets per night.

Hannah said because the giraffes have a four chamber stomach and are ruminate mammals.

“They always have to have access to hay so their stomachs don’t get empty,” Hannah said.

The group has a mixture of squash, sweet potatoes, bell peppers to round out their diet and splits around 1,000 pounds of pieces of veggies between them. 

‘He is definitely the most charismatic’

Towering in a bit under 17-feet tall and weighing in at 2,700 pounds Rafiki is a favorite among the staff and can be counted on to go with the flow.

“What's interesting about him is most of our other giraffes are very timid about new things and scared of anything that looks different,” Hannah said.

A new fan added to the rhino stall might have been a bit new to the other giraffes, but Rafiki doesn’t seem to mind new things.

Staff would describe him as a people person.

“He is always the one that we can rely on to go where we want him to go and do what we want him to do,” Hannah said.

Hannah said she enjoys working with the animals.

Enrichment is also a part of their activity each day.

At each, station the giraffes have PVC pipe and activities to keep their tongue moving.

“We put food in there and make their tongues work to get food, much like they use their tongues in the wild to pull leaves off of trees. They have strong, sticky tongues for this purpose,” marketing director Andrea Hill said.

For more information about the Brevard Zoo, go to: https://brevardzoo.org/animals/expedition-africa/giraffe/


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