A rhino grows in Lansing

In the wee hours of Christmas 2019, a humble birth in a straw-lined barn in Lansing, Michigan, lit up the front page of The New York Times, was harked and heralded on NBC and NPR and spread comfort and joy around the world.

One year later, a sweet-tempered eastern black rhino named Jaali is pushing 1,000 pounds — a conservation triumph for the Potter Park Zoo, a star attraction for its 100th year and a precious package of genes with the potential to help a critically endangered species come back from the brink of extinction. There are only about 5,000 eastern black rhinos alive in the wild and fewer than 60 in accredited zoos.

While a turbulent 2020 raged outside the zoo, Jaali quietly grew a horn and learned how to be a rhino. Here’s an inside look at Jaali’s first year, from his wobbly first steps to summer sparring matches in the yard with his mom, Doppsee, to this week’s gala birthday cake, a vegetarian browser’s fantasia of watermelon, alfalfa cubes and peanut butter frosting.

Raring to go

Pat Fountain, head zookeeper at Potter Park Zoo, summed up 2020 as a “very special and very difficult” year.

“We didn’t get the chance to share Jaali with everyone like we wanted to,” Fountain said. The zoo closed to the public March 14 for the first COVID-19 lockdown and reopened, to outdoor viewing only, June 18, with strict distancing guidelines.

None of that stopped Jaali and her mother, Doppsee, from instantly joining the ranks of pandemic-year Facebook and Twitter stars. Jaunty trots around the yard, sparring matches, tender moments, mud baths — the rhino reality show never stops.

“The year has been amazing on social media,” zookeeper Ashleigh Winkelmann said. “People all over the world are following Jaali.”

On the day after Christmas, zoo veterinarian Ronan Eustace verified that the baby was fine, in what may have been the world’s fastest neo-natal exam.

“We were able to separate Doppsee from Jaali very, very briefly,” Eustace said. Doppsee, a 3,000-pound first-time mom, was visibly getting more nervous by the second. “We wanted to do more things, but we didn’t want to stress her out.”

Eustace checked Jaali for abnormalities like heart murmurs or cleft palate and made sure the major organs were functioning.

“You could tell just by looking at him that he was a very healthy rhino calf,” Eustace said. “He was making the right sort of noises, moved normally, and he got up and nursed right away.”

Rhinos are a “precocial” species, meaning they barrel into the world like a miniature adult, without going through a long, drawn-out series of developmental milestones. For example, Jaali was walking within 90 minutes.

“It’s not like a human baby,” Eustace said “They’re pretty much raring to go within a few hours.”

For several weeks after Jaali was born, keepers monitored the barn via closed circuit TV.

“We got to watch what rhinos do at night when we’re all sleeping,” zookeeper Kim Hernandez said. “For one thing, Doppsee likes to rearrange her house.” The barn floor was lined with straw instead of wood chips to make it easier for Jaali to keep her footing. Some nights, Doppsee spent hours pushing the straw around until it was just right.

For the first several weeks, mother and baby were inseparable 24 hours a day, but night footage showed Doppsee taking some “me time” after that, leaving Jaali to sleep at the far side of the barn.

By early January, Jaali was mouthing food and hay (without swallowing yet).  By the middle of the month, he was coming up to the keepers to be petted.

The tight-knit community of rhino handlers already knew of Doppsee’s remarkably gregarious and calm disposition during her pregnancy. It looked as if Jaali was picking up the same personality.

His gregariousness encouraged zookeepers to start training him earlier than most rhino calves, but it took patience to coax him to step on the scale for his first weigh-in Feb. 22.

They started by coaxing Jaali to touch his nose or some other part of his body to a lollipop-lke “target stick” and rewarding him with fruits and veggies. He gradually came closer to the scale and finally stepped up. His most recent weigh-in, in November, came in at 390 kilos, just under 860 pounds. (He gains about 10 to 20 pounds a week.) He’ll likely top 1,000 pounds, or half a ton, by the end of the year.

Rhino en pointe

Doppsee’s and Jaali’s easy-going temperament is an exception to the rule in the rhino world, and a godsend to Eustace as he sees to their health and safety without any part of him being crushed or impaled.

Rhinos are prone to foot ailments, so keepers trained Jaali to raise his foot in a rhino version of ballet pointe for inspections, nail filing and other cleaning and maintenance. At the sound of the word “foot,” he will raise his foot on a 3-inch block, allowing Eustace or a student to reach under and do a blood draw from the tender skin of his opposite thigh. Jaali has also learned to open his mouth on command, so Eustace and the keepers can check on his teeth.

But Jaali and Doppsee have nothing on Phineus, the Potter Park’s resident male rhino, who can sit and lay down on command. (He learned those clinically useless but entertaining behaviors at his previous digs, the Caldwell Zoo in Tyler, Texas.)

It’s rare for any big animal, let alone a rhino, to stand still and allow a safe blood draw or vaccination. The Potter Park Zoo’s 700-pound, full-grown bongo (a species of antelope) has to be darted with a tranquilizer to get a shot — a stressful time for the bongo and a heavy lift for all concerned.

“Usually, any species over 100 kilograms  — that sort of manual stuff is off the table, because they’re just too strong,” Eustace said. “It takes 10 people to lift up a bongo that weighs 300 kilos.”

But Jaali hasn’t flinched yet at a blood draw or a vaccination.

“I try my best not to dart an animal unless I really have to,” Eustace said. “No matter what you do, the animal doesn’t really understand it. It’s always a negative experience. But with Jaali, I just come up to him, scratch him, give him an injection and he just stands there.”

Rhinos look indestructible, but they are subject to perils such as leptospirosis, a bacterial blood infection that infects wild and domestic mammals and spreads to (and from) humans.

The infection, which can lead to kidney disease or rupture of red blood cells, has been a significant cause of death in black rhinos in captivity.

Jaali has been vaccinated for leptospirosis, rabies, West Nile virus and eastern equine encephalitis viruses, known to veterinarians as “triple E.”

“Two years ago, Michigan had a triple E outbreak where 10 people died and there were multiple cases in horses,” Eustace said.

Eustace doesn’t know yet whether any zoo animals, rhinos included, will get a coronavirus vaccine. Researchers are still learning how the virus spreads among animals and how serious a threat it is to them.

In April, a 4-year-old Malayan tiger at the Bronx Zoo tested positive for COVID-19. Four other tigers and three African lions there later tested positive.

In December, four lions at the Barcelona Zoo tested positive. None of them got seriously ill.

“They were infected from their keepers, who didn’t know they were infected,” Eustace said. “Large tigers and lions are more susceptible than domestic house cats, for whatever reason.” He guessed that the small number of big cats and their limited gene pool might play a role.

The Potter Park Zoo staff is tracking the pandemic as it unfolds and modifying its treating of some animals, such as ferrets, when their counterparts in other zoos get COVID.

“Our interactions with Jaali were a lot easier and a lot more natural when we didn’t have to wear face masks and he could see us,” Hernandez said.

When Jaali was newborn, keepers wore gloves when touching him, but after a few weeks, both rhino and humans delighted in skin on skin contact.

“Then we had to wear face masks and gloves again,” Hernandez sighed.

Meanwhile, Eustace visits Jaali regularly for a social call and head scratch. That way, Jaali doesn’t associate him only with pokes and probes.

Potter Park’s rhinos have kept Eustace busy all year. MSU large animal vets helped him with a complicated and very heavy lift this year: anesthetizing and performing an upper gastrointestinal endoscopy on Jaali’s father, Phineus.

In late September, Eustace and the zoo staff again examined Phineus, working with Monica Stoops, one of the nation’s top rhino reproductive experts.

In a historic step toward species conservation, Stoops collected semen from Phineus to freeze it for artificial insemination work. The semen can even be sexed, so researchers can target-breed to produce males or females, according to need.

“We’re really happy that we could help out with these reproduction conservation studies,” Eustace said. “There are only so many black rhinos.”

Snow and mud

The Potter Park Zoo’s rhino barn is still closed to the public, but viewing windows permit a peek inside. If the temperature is above 20 degrees and there’s no ice to slip on, the rhinos are free to roam the yard, where they are quite easy to spot, to say the least.

“Doppsee loves snow,” Winkelmann said. “When we get a lot of snow, she loves to go out and run around, get her horn into the snow and toss it in the air.”

Last week, keepers brought a few buckets of snow into the barn and showed it to Jaali.

“He hasn’t seen what Michigan winters are,” Winkelmann said. “It will be really interesting to see what he does with a lot of snow when we get it.”

Throughout the year, keepers introduce a variety of stimuli to the daily round of eating, sleeping and hanging out in the yard. Spices and perfumes are brought in for the rhinos to smell. (They seem to enjoy cumin.) Food is often packed into “boomer balls,” thick plastic balls they love to bat around until the food pops out.

Alfalfa cubes are Jaali’s favorite treat. Apples, sweet potatoes and carrots are popular with all the rhinos, but they also eat pumpkin, watermelon, greens, peanut butter and cereal, in addition to their ever-present nutritional pellets.

The rhinos seem to prize peppermint candies most highly of all — so highly that only the veterinarians are allowed to dole them out, for positive reinforcement.

In the wild, rhinos spend much of the day munching tasty leaves and branches from live trees and shrubs. It’s hard to mimic the diet of browsers in a zoo, but keepers try to freshen up the “browse” regularly by placing branches around the yard.

The public is encouraged to contribute browsing material to the zoo. A list of nontoxic plants that make for good browsing, from dogwood and forsythia to honeysuckle, sugar maple and willow, is available at potterparkzoo.org/fresh-browse-donation-program. (People who plan to trim a tree soon can call Fountain at 483-4222. In winter, the zoo staff will accept branches without leaves.)

In the summer, the rhinos enjoy long wallows in chocolatey mud. “The mud is really good for them,” Winkelmann said. “It acts as a sun block and protects their skin. It’s a natural behavior, and we help them do it.” In winter, when the ground is hard, the keepers bring a large bucket of soupy mud into the barn and rub it on the rhinos.

“We get real dirty with them, and they seem to really enjoy it,” zookeeper Murphy Swartz said. “It’s like a spa day for them.”

For Jaali’s birthday on Christmas Eve, zookeepers will whip up a special “cake” made of iced watermelon and other fruit, most likely with peanut butter frosting.

There won’t be a live feed, but footage will go up on the zoo’s website, where followers from around the world will share in the festivities.

‘They need more rhinos’

As zoos evolve from entertainment venues to indispensable arks of conservation, they’re not shy about putting cute baby animals to serious work. Jaali, Doppsee and Phineus are part of an international managed breeding plan, a Hail Mary pass for a mighty line of megafauna that’s hanging on by its three massive toes.

Only about 27,000 rhinos remain in the wild today, down from 500,000 at the turn of the 20th century, according to the World Wildlife Foundation. Most of them live in national parks or wildlife preserves in South Africa, Zimbabwe, Namibia and Kenya, where it’s harder for poachers to get to them, but there is no such thing as a safe space. In 2017, poachers shot and killed a rhino living in a zoo near Paris and removed its horn.

Rhino horn is worth more than diamonds on the black market, owing largely to widespread beliefs, especially in Asia, that they work any number of miracles, from curing cancer to enhancing sex drive.

Jaali’s species, the eastern black rhino, is slowly bouncing back from a low point of about 2,500 20 years ago to 5,000 at present, but that’s still a tiny fraction of the 100,000 black rhinos that once roamed east Africa. Worldwide, there are about 60 eastern black rhinos and about 1,000 rhinos of all species living in zoos.

“There’s just not enough to be genetically sustainable over 100 years,” Eustace said. “They need more rhinos.”

Phineus’ sperm is already in a bank, awaiting timely deployment. In a few years, a breeding recommendation for Jaali will likely take him to a zoo where his sperm is needed to keep the gene pool viable.

“Hopefully Doppsee will get pregnant in another few years, she’ll have another baby and she continues to have lots of calves in her lifetime,” Eustace said.

In a race against time, the Potter Park Zoo is participating in a comprehensive black rhino study organized by the Smithsonian National Zoo.

With blood samples from Jaali and rhinos around the country, Smithsonian researchers are developing a genetic profile of the captive rhino population, to make breeding programs as healthy and productive as possible.

That’s a lot of responsibility for a little guy, but Jaali seems to take it in stride. In several years, he will likely get a “breeding recommendation” and be paired with a female at another zoo, as his father, Phineus, was.

“Right now, the plan is just for him continue to learn to be a happy, healthy rhino from his mom,” Eustace said.

For Winkelmann, Swartz, Hernandez and fellow keepers Adriana Davidson and Amy Pierce, 2020 was a year like no other.

To Hernandez, the past year has been especially sweet after over two years of hard work laying the groundwork for Jaali’s birth, from multiple rounds of carefully managed mating encounters to Doppsee’s long pregnancy.

“As testosterone kicks in, he could change and become more like his Dad, but he’s just so mellow, not your typical rhino,” Hernandez said.

Jaali’s first birthday brings Swartz’s thoughts back to her most vivid memory as a zookeeper.

In late 2019, Swartz got a chance to put her hand on Doppsee’s stomach, where a spunky Jaali was almost ready to see daylight.

Rhinos can muster up some pretty impressive intestinal rumbles, but this was not that. “It was unmistakable, having a foot kick your hand through her stomach,” Swartz said. “You’re just in awe, ecstatic. Now he’s here, in the zoo, running circles in the yard, sparring with Mom, doing natural behaviors he would do in the wild.”