A six-year-old female Cape Sabi forms a breeding pair with a fourteen-year-old male Draco. According to breeders, she is inquisitive and temperamental. Photo by Oliver Le Que, Prague Zoo
A new female Cape grebe has arrived at the Prague Zoo.
Almost six-year-old Sabi forms a breeding pair with fourteen-year-old male Draco. Visitors can now observe the new couple in the African House.
“Breeding Cape grebes in human care is very demanding, but the Prague Zoo has been doing well for a long time. We would therefore like to capitalize on our experience and at the same time take advantage of the fact that we have a proven breeding male in the zoo, of which there are half the number of females in the European population – and that is why Sabi came to us,” says Barbora Dobiášová, curator of ungulates at the Prague Zoo. “She is a young female and her behavior reflects that. Compared to Draco, he is significantly more temperamental and lively,” adds Dobiášová.
A new pair of rakes, on the left the female Sabi, on the right the male Draco, clearly understood each other at the first meeting together. Photo by Oliver Le Que, Prague Zoo
Sabi was born in August 2017 at the zoo in Antwerp, Belgium. Since 2019, she has lived in the Pilsen Zoo, from where she traveled to the Prague Zoo this spring. The current breeding female from Prague, the popular Kvída, will now devote herself more to rest due to her advanced age. However, her daughter Farisa, born last year, went to the Pilsen Zoo.
If visitors want to be sure to see a new pair of grebes, they can observe them during their regular feeding from 10.30 in the African House. They enjoy this on mealybug larvae, which they can pick from a narrow glass tube or from a special ball with holes using their long sticky tongue.
Breeding of Cape grebes has a long history at the Prague Zoo. The first pair, female Bojsa and Nebojsa, came to the zoo already in 1979. The first breeding was successful here in 1989.