A family visiting a zoo witnessed a once in a lifetime event—the “amazing” birth of a baby sloth.
Erica Higgins, her husband and their two children were exploring the sloth enclosure at the Drusillas Park zoo in southeastern England on August 23 when she saw something unusual.
Higgins, an ex-veterinary nurse, noticed something “glistening” at the rear of one adult sloth and quickly realized something unusual was happening. She called over her children and husband, as well as a member of staff, to have a look.
“The process was extremely quick, lasting a few minutes at most,” Higgins said in a zoo press release. “I noticed a strange glistening membrane at the sloth’s rear, so I stayed to investigate.”
Drusillas Park
“As I turned to get a better view, I noticed her push out the baby, which was still within her amniotic sac. The mother quickly turned, licked off the membrane and started to care for her baby.”
Higgins managed to capture the moments just after the birth on video. In the clip, the mother sloth, called Halina, can be seen tenderly licking her new infant clean.
Sloth pregnancies are notoriously difficult to predict because the abdomens of the mothers do not swell much. In addition, these creatures spend much of their time curled up in a ball, making it hard to witness births even when they do happen.
“Some of our zookeepers have worked with sloths for more than three decades and none of them have witnessed a birth, so it really was a lucky thing to see,” Tamara Nasser, a park spokesperson, told Newsweek. “It was quite an amazing thing for her to have witnessed.”
Higgins said she and her family had been excited about seeing the sloths before they came to the zoo. But they never could have expected that they would witness a live birth.
“It was a privilege to witness the birth, the event has ignited a newfound admiration of sloths,” Higgins said in the press release. “My husband and I feel absolutely delighted to witness such a rare and important event. We hope mother and baby are doing well.”
The zoo is now home to five Linne’s two-toed sloths—a species found in several South American nations. So far, the baby seems to be doing well, according to the zookeepers.
“We are absolutely thrilled to bits to share this exciting news with you all, the new arrival is something we are immensely proud of as a team,” head keeper Gemma Romanis said in a statement.
She continued: “Baby seems to be thriving under the careful watch of our keepers and is doing everything it should be at this stage. Halina is being wonderfully attentive and is more than happy for us to do our checks on baby when we need to. We don’t yet know if it’s a boy or a girl.”