Anyway, after that breeding, about 22 or 21 1/2 moths later comes
the baby. In the National Zoo, we originally were going to send
Shanthi to Calgary to be bred with the other Sri Lankan male,
the only Sri Lankan male in North America. But at the time that
that was being determined in the mid-'80's to send Shanthi away
would have left Ambika, our older female, by herself, and there
would have been no companion for her, and it was decided it would
be more detrimental to Ambika to do that than it would be advantageous
to Shanthi to move her. So new plans had to be made. When I
came here in 1988, my first task was to go about bringing elephants
together so that we could have a social group so Shanthi could
go to another zoo for breeding. That had to be done because one,
we didn't have a facility here in our zoo for breeding elephants.
We couldn't house a male. And that's one of the major problems
that zoos have in North America. Male elephants are almost like
a different species; they're big, they're aggressive, their life
is meant to be competing for the opportunity to breed. And when
you put them in a zoo setting, they need a specialized area.
They don't live with the female in social family groups when they're
mature. They need their own space, and they need something that's
pretty sturdy because these guys get very aggressive. They go
through the period of musth where they have heightened testosterone
levels in their blood, they become very aggressive. So most zoos
are unwilling to manage male elephants, and in fact there are
only 14 adult breeding male Asian elephants in North America out
of a population of about 375 elephants. So it's very difficult
to find a male to breed with. And artificial insemination, up
until this time, has never been successful in elephants. We hope
to change that, and you will hear about that later on in the program.
So we needed to find another option. And in the late '80's we
moved Nancy, our African elephant, from her solitary end of the
building, down with the other elephants for two reasons. One
was because she needed socialization as a female elephant, and
two, so Ambika would have a partner, and Shanthi then could go
somewhere else and be bred. About 1988, after we'd accomplished
putting the elephants together, we began doing a reproductive
study. We worked with Jeanine Brown out at the Conservation and
Research Center and began monitoring the hormone levels of our
female elephants, and preparing for the day when we would be ready
to breed Shanthi. That's been a long-standing project now of
seven years in reproductive assessment, which is really coming
to fruition today in the programs you'll see later.
We sent Shanthi away to the Syracuse Zoo to meet a lovely male
elephant named Indy in 1991. She stayed there for 20 months,
after she was there about 11 months, she conceived. It was kind
of an interesting story because she was very reluctant. She didn't
like the male very much. And one day they found that they came
into the barn in February of '92, and she was backed up the male
elephant's stall and wouldn't leave. They decided they would
put the elephants together. We knew that she was about to cycle
at that time because we were continuing to monitor her hormone
levels. And they put them together and couldn't get them apart
for two days. That was when conception occurred. It's funny,
they know how to do these things, if we just let them, things
would work. And once we confirmed pregnancy, we waited for the
first trimester to be over. We brought Shanthi back in November
of 1992, and then began preparing for the blessed event.
Now, we had a lot of preparation. We were taking blood on a daily basis as we approached the time of what we expected to be parturition. We were also taking daily milk samples and looking at the changes in the calcium concentration in the milk to predict the birth of the elephant, and we put on a night watch. There may be some of our night watchers here who did yeoman duty watching the behavior of our elephant and calling us when they thought there was something going on. Well, the night that Shanthi did give birth to Kumari, we knew that time was close. We knew that the hormonal levels had reached the stage where birth was imminent. We had three keepers staying overnight that night. I, of course, decided I would go home, predicting accurately that there would be no birth that night. We got a call from the watcher that something was going on. The keepers came up from the basement where we had set up cots for them to stay, and sure enough they saw that there was a lot of agitation, a lot of fluid had been lost. It looked like maybe the water had broken and it was time. Now, from my experience in the Calgary Zoo, we estimated for a first birth that there would be about seven hours between the time we first noticed changes, and the birth - the first change you would notice in the elephant is this bulge under the tail. That's not normal.