00:03I'm Alyssa McCaffrey, lead keeper at the Animal Care Center Nursery and we're here
00:08at Harder Hospital and we are bottle feeding Buridi, our Maasai giraffe calf.
00:16Buridi was born in December on a very very cold night, dipping down into the 30s. When he was
00:23born he had an infection and was unable to stand so we had keepers doing a 24-hour watch on
00:30him and
00:30it was decided that he needed to come down to the hospital. When he got down to the hospital his
00:34temperature was very low so he needed to be on IV fluids and have special care. With giraffes sometimes
00:44it's really hard keeping their attention and focus on the bottle and we do have a couple of tricks
00:49that we use with our giraffes. This is our very special giraffe bee or blanket. It has been used
00:55for now four giraffe calves and when we're getting the calves started on the bottle we hold the blanket
01:03up and they they kind of start getting interested maybe in the pattern of the blanket and then we're
01:08able to put the bottle and nipple and they usually start suckling. We're afraid that if we wash the
01:14special blanket that the magic will go away and we won't be able to get our giraffes to eat.
01:19So us keepers have to deal with the smell every day when we feed these giraffes. Brady has done
01:26incredibly well taking his bottles throughout his hospital stay and he's now large enough that we're
01:32going to be putting him out into our East African exhibit so he can be in the nursery group with
01:37our other bottle baby Congo. Now here we are in the East Africa exhibit in the wide open space. It
01:46was
01:46quite the challenge feeding Brady at the hospital but now that he has all this room he's graduated
01:52from his stinky blanket. He is doing very well out here in East Africa in the nursery group and we
01:59are
01:59very excited to watch him grow into a big giraffe.
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