Sharjah: An endangered Manchurian crane sits undisturbed on her eggs on a green patch of land with shrubs and water systems that hardly looks like a typical animal enclosure. Around her, Al Bustan Zoological Centre staff cautiously work together to make sure she gets the best chances of breeding successfully.
The care given to the red-crowned crane is also given to the 855 other animals currently housed at the Al Bustan Zoological Centre, a 17-hectare wildlife reserve located on the road to Kalba.
Al Bustan started off as a small family farm by an Emirati businessman with private collections of cheetahs and birds in the 1980s and was later incorporated as a zoological centre in 1998.
A non-commercial zoo that is not open to the public, Al Bustan is a safe haven and breeding centre for threatened species, most of which come from Africa, the Middle East, and South America.
“The challenge is you need to keep them happy and attend to everyone’s specific need. It’s like having 856 babies on the farm,” Meyer de Kock, manager of the centre, told Gulf News during a visit.
A total of 60 staff work tirelessly to ensure that the special needs of each and every animal at the centre are taken care of.
A team of specialists and nutritionists at the centre’s kitchen prepares food for each of the animals based on their weight and daily nutritional needs. Feed is then hand-delivered in cool boxes to their enclosures to ensure freshness. All feeding bowls and areas are disinfected before feeding time.
On certain days, zookeepers present the food in different ways to teach animals to forage to mimic natural behaviours in the wild.
“We put the food on sticks or any natural things [in their enclosure] that they can figure out. Sometimes we bury it in substrate, but we mainly hang it up to make it more difficult to get to,” Donovan de Boer, curator of birds and primates, told Gulf News.
Each enclosure is designed specifically to recreate forests, mountains, wetlands, wadis and water systems for all the animals based on their need. The enclosures are kept open with very little fencing, if possible.
Non-desert animals are provided with enclosures with attached night rooms with cooling systems. As in the wild, spotting a sick animal could be very tricky as zookeepers have a small window of opportunity.
“Obviously, because they’re wild they tend not to show any symptoms until it’s really bad. It’s very difficult, they’re exactly like kids. So each animal is monitored or checked every day so the keepers know their animals and can tell which one is not looking well,” Kate Burns, the centre’s veterinary nurse, told Gulf News.
To keep the animals in the peak of health, the centre’s veterinarian visits twice a month to check on them. Stool samples are drawn every three months to make sure the animals are free of parasites.
Once a year, animals are taken for a comprehensive check-up to do “maintenance work” such as vaccination, de-worming, dental work, among others. The centre also has a hospital complete with recovery room and all basic structures needed for animal care.
Selective breeding
Al Bustan started its cheetah-breeding programme with 19 cheetahs in 2004. The programme has so far resulted in 53 cheetah births and six King cheetahs, making the centre the third largest cheetah-breeding centre in the world and the largest outside Africa.
De Kock said that while they breed animals at the centre, all active breeding programmes are managed with the assistance and guidance of international experts, to ensure species are managed on an international scale and not on a zoo level.
“We cannot just breed, breed, and breed. The breeding that we do needs to be genetically viable. We need to manage breeding in a much bigger way and that’s where the Studbooks come in,” de Kock said.
A Studbook records the family tree of all existing animals of a selected species on a global scale. It is maintained by an expert appointed internationally to impartially decide on which animals need to breed, with whom, and from which zoo or institution, to maintain the genetic diversity of the species.
“The Studbook will take the pedigree information of your animal and see who it would breed with the best. So there’s like an international understanding that we’re here for the betterment of the animals,” Burns explained.
“So, the zoos are basically almost like a back-up plan, if you will, if the species failed in the wild. Hopefully one day, we will be able to release genetically sound, healthy animals back into their natural environment,” she added.
As with humans, caring for the animals’ offspring or the ‘babies’ consumes most of the time of the staff. This is to ensure that they grow healthy and can help in conservation projects of institutions in other parts of the world.
“If we get one offspring, we need to spend time and effort to make sure that he is in perfect health. It’s our responsibility to make sure that he doesn’t end up as a pet for anybody but goes in a similar breeding project where the time and effort that we put in, the love that we put in, in relation to this animal, will be accepted and we’re going to have some positive contribution for this specific species,” de Kock stressed.
Expansion plans
Al Bustan is awaiting new family members this September and by next year. Some primates, a pair of okapi, and a pair of American alligators will be at the zoo as part of the centre’s expansion plans.
But De Kock said Al Bustan does not acquire new animals at whim. The centre follows a strict protocol in that they have a Collection Plan where new species can be acquired only when a set of specific needs are met such as the need for breeding, education, provision for correct enclosure, capacity for husbandry, and food items for the animal diet and medication availability in the UAE.
These strict measures Al Bustan employs should serve as a wake-up call to people in the UAE who love to keep exotic animals like cheetahs, jaguars, and others as pets.
