When you get a new arrival, it's always
you always have a little bit of excitement but apprehension at the same time
because when you add a new animal to a group, whether it be any animal
you never really know 100% how it's gonna go
These things can always go wrong but that's why we plan for them to try and
prevent anything happening
So we just kept it all quiet and calm and
just let her in her own time just see where she was
so she gets her new surroundings and everything
Sharing the space with the cranes and the guinea fowl
are a family of dik-diks
a small species of antelope usually found in eastern and southern Africa
So we've got a breeding pair and one young
Drax the male, he's the dad
Female's called Grace
going off the Drax theme
the son's called Rocket from Guardians of the Galaxy
I have a little bit of a concern with the new female coming in
because at the moment we've still got our young male
who's the offspring of the original pair
there is a potential issue that if they do pair up
we could have conflict between the new pair and the original pair
Dik-diks mate for life and couples wouldn't normally share territory with other pairs
Dik-dik don't generally tend to fight what they tend to do is, run at each other
and just as they get close to each other, kind of head flap
and then they walk away and the distance gets closer and closer each time
until one of them decides, no I've had enough,
you're bigger than me, go away
For Rocket it'll soon be time to leave the zoo
a perfectly natural event
most dik-diks only stay with their parents until they're six months old
He's now four months old, so he'll be with
his mum and his dad for probably another couple of months before
we look to move him off to go somewhere else
Whilst young dik-diks leave the family at a young age
the older couples are in it for the long run
and they have a very unique way of showing it
The female will go to the toilet and then the male will then come and do it on top of the females
and then because it's on top of the females
the smells are there and when she comes over
she'll smell him, and he'll smell her
and it just reaffirms that bond
All animals have different ways of expressing love
let's put it that way
some not so pleasant, some pleasant
The new female dik-dik is called Noodles
and has come from a zoo in the Cotswolds
Noodles introduction to her new home most be done slowly
so as not to overwhelm her
You do it step by steps
what we did first, we let her out to the wee catching pen first
where she could actually she the outside of the African aviary
and see all the other dik-dik
and then we though we'll just go for it
because she seemed quite settled
How they would react was completely unknown to us, you do have again
that slight chance that they might react adversely to her
But eventually young male Rocket comes over to investigate
That's a new girl in town
That was really good that
definitely keen on his new girlfriend
Rocket tries to make a move
Think you just got told off there boyo
A few weeks later and there's been a change of plans
young male Rocket is still at the zoo
So after all our concerns about what was going to happen
when Noodle arrived
actually what happens was complete opposite
within three or four days of them being together
we actually saw Rocket attempting to mate the new female
but the unexpected thing is that they are actually all living together nicely as a four
they still share the same house
they use the same toilet
again which is, quite weird
and yeah, they've been living together quite
happily together for the last couple of months