00:01We have four types of rhino here at the Wild Animal Park.
00:04We have the southern white rhinos that I work with,
00:07along with the greater one-horned Asian rhinos in our Asian Plains exhibit.
00:11And then we also have the northern white rhinos in our South Africa exhibit
00:15and the black rhinos in their own enclosure.
00:17Most of the animals I work with have personalities,
00:20and the white rhinos are particularly fun.
00:23We allow four to eight flakes of hay per rhino
00:27and 25 pounds of pellet for each rhino every day.
00:32And today, since it's a rainy day, they're going to get just hay,
00:35so we'll probably double the amount of hay that we feed in the exhibit today.
00:39We have eight white rhinos in the East African exhibit, one male and seven females.
00:47Chuck, our male, is kind of the nonchalant guy
00:51that's always hanging around waiting for one of the girls.
00:54We also have Kiyazi and Ntombe.
00:57Ntombe is one of the original rhinos that came to the Wild Animal Park from South Africa,
01:01and Kiyazi is her coalition partner.
01:05We have three female rhinos that tend to hang together.
01:08They're Dumisha, Utamu, and Holly.
01:10Dumisha's the oldest and tends to hang to the back,
01:13and Utamu, whose name is Sweetness, is always the one at the front,
01:17kind of checking things out, and Holly tends to be in the middle,
01:21kind of seeing how things are going before she enters a situation.
01:24White rhino horns are made of compressed keratin strands,
01:28and if you look at Utamu's horn, you'll be able to see the strands.
01:33We have two new additions here to the rhino family at the Wild Animal Park.
01:37We have Dakari and Casey, who both came to us from Florida.
01:40And what we're going to do is we're going to give them small handfuls.
01:43Matt and I are going to give them small handfuls of alfalfa
01:46in exchange for coming to the truck when they're called.
01:49And our plan is to eventually get them to come to the truck,
01:53follow us all the way up to the Boma,
01:55and then we'll be able to lock them into the Boma and get weights on them
01:58and hopefully do blood draws and other things in the future.
02:01Come on, girls.
02:03Casey is a little bit more standoffish, but because she's been paired with Dakari,
02:13she actually is learning to come over to the truck and do part of our training with her.
02:17Part of the reason we bring them over to the truck is so that we can be tactile with them
02:21and actually rub and touch them.
02:23They enjoy being touched, and that's one of the rewards they get for doing the behaviors correctly.
02:27You're alright. See, that wasn't so bad.
02:52This is the best training session we've ever had with the rhinos. This is awesome.
02:56I know.
03:02Good girl, yeah. We get touched. It's not a bad thing.
03:10What I like most about being a rhino keeper is that through the society I've had the opportunity to travel
03:15and get together with other rhino keepers from around the world
03:18and share our knowledge and make things better for the rhinos we all take care of.
03:22It's a four-year-old female rhino. Her name is Alta, and she's just, after a 30-day quarantine,
03:29has been released into our new exhibit, the Asian Plains exhibit at the Wild Animal Park.
03:33Alta came from the Bronx Zoo, and she was sent here on a breeding loan.
03:37Well, initially, once she was released, she was a little spooky or a little flighty.
03:42Coming out into this size of an exhibit, there's many things that she has to get used to.
03:46Not only the animals in the exhibit, but vehicles.
03:48We have keeper trucks out there. We have our photo caravan trucks.
03:51We have equipment that's working in the field.
03:53Initially, she was actually charging some of the vehicles, which isn't that uncommon.
03:56They don't, you know, she's probably never really been exposed to trucks driving around her.
03:59So once she got in and settled in, and she started realizing that the trucks were bringing food,
04:03and certainly in the photo caravans, she looks at them entirely different now.
04:07Now that she's getting used to the enclosure, there are several species of deer, antelope, cattle.
04:13A lot of animals that she would be interacting with in the wild of India or Nepal
04:17are very similar to the animals that she's integrating with now.
04:22We'll probably give her maybe a month or so out there on her own,
04:25and then eventually we'll release the male and just make sure she knows the exhibit,
04:29she's able to negotiate it.
04:31The male that she will be paired up with was brought in from a zoo in India.
04:35That's a new breeding, a completely new breeding group with her and him.
04:39And they're really not sexually mature until they're about seven years old.
04:42So we have a few years for her to get acclimated into the exhibit, settle in,
04:45and then I would certainly expect her to have a calf by the time she's probably eight, nine years old.
04:50If any of our guests would like to come out and see Alta,
04:53you will take a photo caravan or you can take our new Savannah Safari.
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