brand new baby meerkat! - "burrow move"

Watch in high quality if possible! A very young pup (max. 3 days old) is briefly brought to the surface and carried from one burrow to the next. The mother carefully carries the baby in her mouth. In the wild, a "burrow move" is performed when the old burrow is for some reason not safe anymore, etc but this can also be dangerous to the pups, as when very young they should really be kept underground (as seen on meerkat manor). In captivity this doesn't really make sense and there is some confusion among the meerkats (especially since these two burrows are connected underground anyway...). This is the first litter for the group to survive for more than a few hours, there was in the past at least one miscarriage and one litter of three pups that died immediately after birth. We don't know how many pups there are in this litter. Normally pups will stay underground for the first two weeks or so. We saw pups being carried around twice but can't tell right now whether these were two different individuals or the same one being carried here there and back again. While the pup is being carried around you can hear the typical pup vocalizations. You can also see remains of the umbilical cord.

We'll only know for sure how many there are when they emerge (hopefully)

Some people might of course be more interested in Angelina Jolie's babies but such young meerkat babies are not something you will see everyday at a zoo or animal park :)
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The meerkat group is at home in the Mundenhof animal park in Freiburg, Germany. It has been a 6 member group over the last 5 years, with one female and five younger males.
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UPDATE: there really seems to be only this one pup.
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UPDATED UPDATE: (Jul 26)
*** wrong! *** There are three pups, seen alive and well today.
Go here to see how the little creature from this video has grown in 11 days - it now has fur and its eyes are open, it can take a few steps... and its bigger :)
(there's no way for us to tell which one of the three is this one though one of the pups has a very short tail missing its end and this one doesn't, so ot has to be one of the other two.
See the new video here
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VOybLlG4TNs
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DOUBLE-UPDATED UPDATE
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As of February 2009 the three pups have
grown into proud and strong juvenile meerkats. The largest one of them, a male called Snoutie, is already almost as big as the smallest adult male, Swingkat (six years old)

Category:

Pets & Animals

Tags:

• meerkat
• erdmännchen
• suricate
• baby
• pups
• newborn
• burrow
• move
• mundenhof
• freiburg
• möfzi
• animal
• park
• tiergehege
• babies
• surykatki
• manor
• cuddly
• furry
• mammals

[nyatnagarl]

11 days later we have found out that there are actually 3 pups. It looked as if the mother was always carrying around one pup but actually it seems she was just always taking a random one along :) The pups are OK although it's not quite normal for them to be dragged around so much at this young age, see the more recent video linked from the "video responses". There will be more about these pups in the next few days.

[dianajtb]

Oh ist das süß....herzlichen Glückwunsch ;)

Diana alias cesidi ;)

[nyatnagarl]

Der Dawanda-Youtube Link funktioniert ja fast in Echtzeit :)

[007spudman]

whats with the french comments

[SuricataObscura]

We visited yesterday and today. The baby is still alive and well.

The baby`s mother seemed more calm and relaxed today and did not constantly drag her pup around. All members have been seen to care for the pup.

[mputzki]

schön gemacht