CUTE ALERT! Taronga Zoo’s adorable fur-seal pup has a name at last!
You thought naming a baby was hard!
Choosing the name that a baby will live with for the rest of their life is challenging, right? And it appears that those challenges extend to bestowing a name upon adorable little baby animal too … just ask the team at Sydney‘s Taronga Zoo!
It’s taken two whole months to come up with the perfect name for the zoo’s latest arrival – an adorable Long-nosed Fur Seal pup!
On Friday the team finally announced that the two-month-old, big eyed, pup has been named ‘Birubi’, an Indigenous word for Southern Cross after a public vote.
Meet Birubi!
It’s not the only milestone for the adorable arrival who has been finding her flippers with daily swimming lessons with her keepers.
Long-nosed fur seals do not know how to swim from birth, so mum Keke and the Taronga’s keepers have been supporting the pup as she finds her flippers in her purpose-built seal nursery.
Keepers have been slowly lowering the floor to her nursery while mum Keke encourages her to swim in deeper and deeper water.
While she’s sticking to the shallow end for the moment, guests can expect to see Birubi venturing into the ‘big blue’ of Taronga’s Great Southern Oceans precinct closer to the Easter school holidays.
The pup, who made her entrance into the world on 21 December 2020, is the first long-nosed fur seal pup to be born at Taronga Zoo in more than two decades.
The little pup was just 3.58kg when she was first born, but has been suckling well and now weighs in at just over 6kg
Keke is a rescue seal and was bought to the Taronga Wildlife Hospital in 2012 after she was found in Sydney Harbour with injuries from a boat strike. After prolonged treatment she was deemed not to be a suitable candidate for release.
In inquisitive and curious seal, Keke has spent the last few years engaging guests at the Seals for the Wild, powered by Red Energy.
While this little pup is not yet on display, visitors to Taronga can still see Amalie, an adorable five-month-old Australia Sea-lion, who is full of fun antics.
Book your tickets at taronga.org.au.
