The Taipei Zoo yesterday announced that a giraffe had given birth to a male calf.
The baby giraffe, named Hsiao Chang (宵璋), was born at 1:50pm on Wednesday last week after its mother and zoo star attraction, Chang Hsiao (長宵), carried him for 15 months, the zoo said.
Hsiao Chang is 1.8m tall and weighs 62kg, a caretaker said.
Saying that Chang Hsiao is an “experienced mother,” zoo administrators said she was very vigilant about her baby immediately after giving birth, using her hind calves to gently feel the calf before propping up Hsiao Chang between her legs, apparently in an attempt to help it stand.
The calf learned to stand in less than one hour and quickly started feeding on his mother’s milk — a sign that the calf is healthy, administrators said.
Even before Hsiao Chang was able to stand, he was already smacking his lips loudly, seemingly craving his mother’s milk, they said.
The baby is well-built and somewhat restless, they said, adding that it was not until Thursday last week, when caretakers weighed Hsiao Chang, that his sex was confirmed.
The mother and calf are now spending quality time with each other under caretakers’ protection, the zoo said.
Hsiao Chang will make his debut in due time, it said.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
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