The Sacramento Zoo held the grand opening for its new exhibit Friday, featuring two new residents that look like a cross between a zebra and some sort of antelope. They’re called okapi, and they’re the first of their species to live in Northern California since the 1970s.
While they look like a zebra’s distant cousin, okapi are actually the closest living relative of the giraffe, and one of the oldest living mammal species on earth, according to Sacramento Zoo Director Jason Jacobs. They’re large, averaging about 5 feet tall at the shoulder and weighing between 440 and 770 pounds. They’re mostly a dark reddish brown, but have striking white stripes on their legs and backsides.
The telltale sign of their common ancestry is the nubs, called ossicones, on top of a male okapi’s head, the same a giraffe has (female okapi don’t have ossicones). The relation is also evident from the way they graze – on leaves from tall branches, necks and heads craned skyward, grabbing the foliage with a long, dexterous tongue.
The two new Sacramento residents, Mo and Forest, came to Sacramento from the Denver Zoo. They are unrelated males. Forest, a year old, was born at the Denver Zoo; Mo, 6, was born at Disney’s Animal Kingdom in Orlando, Jacobs said.
They came to the zoo in early December and now that they’ve acclimated to their new exhibit they are free to run around. However, because okapi are solitary animals, Mo and Forest live apart, their exhibit split by a bamboo fence.
Their exhibit is new, replacing hornbill cages from the 1960s, Jacobs said. The zoo staff held a ribbon cutting Friday morning to celebrate the new exhibit and its residents, and handlers even brought out birds of prey to the celebration.
“We found homes for those birds, and we tore down those cages, and we created a paradise for okapi here,” said Jacobs.
Okapi are endangered. They’re native to the rainforests of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and the species has suffered poaching and loss of habitat, said Jacobs. The animals are “incredibly rare,” with less than 10,000 in the wild and only about 20 institutions in the U.S. housing them.
“As part of housing them here at the Sacramento Zoo, we support the Okapi Conservation Fund,” Jacobs said, “which supports projects in the DRC to help the animals and employ people there ... it’s important that the act of going to the zoo is an act of conservation.”
The Sacramento Zoo is now the third institution to house okapi in California, with animals also living at the Los Angeles Zoo and the San Diego Zoo and Safari Park.
“This is a really big deal, for the Sacramento Zoo to house these animals,” Jacobs said. “... it’s a great thing for this community, for Northern California, to be able to come here to see the okapi.”
Although Mo and Forest live apart, they can see each other and socialize, said zoo animal care manager Melissa McCartney, who cares for the okapi. And they’re actually quite fond of each other, McCartney said, vocalizing back and forth often. They didn’t live together in Denver, McCartney said, but became friends when they were getting prepped for transport from Denver to Sacramento, and were in neighboring stalls in the barn.
“They’re great for us to have because they’re actually interested in people,” McCartney said. “So with the viewing, you can stand in the center, and they like to walk up around the edge and look at everybody that’s hanging out. They’re just cute and charismatic.”