Big as a horse, the only relative on Earth of the giraffe, the shy, solitary okapi is an oddball among animals.
Taller and heavier than her mate, a female okapi (pronounced o-copy), like a queen bee, pretty much runs things in her world. She picks and chooses among males in mating season, then runs all the men out of her neck of the woods so that she and her babies can have the run of the best, most abundant food in the forest.
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That is just the sort of critter a good scientist might find so fascinating that she would spend 12 years studying it in Africa’s most remote, pristine rain forests.
“They are remarkably secretive, elusive animals, difficult to study,” Terese Hart says. She and her husband, John, have become the world’s ranking okapi authorities since they began following them in nearly inaccessible mahogany forests in central Africa in 1985.
One of the last big mammals on earth to be discovered by western science (in 1901), okapis remained such a mystery until the Hart research began that virtually all that was known about them was from research done with animals in zoos. As one of the earliest zoos to display okapis (1955), and as the first North American zoo to have an okapi birth, Brookfield long has championed the little-known, not-so-glamorous animal. Hart will talk about her research at the zoo at 7 p.m. Thursday.
Through the work of the Harts, the okapi is emerging as a sort of environmental poster child around which people have rallied to create a game reserve the size of Connecticut in Congo (formerly Zaire). The Okapi Wildlife Reserve now protects not only the okapi and a number of other rare and endangered animal species, but also the way of hunter/gatherer tribes who roam the forest, the Mbuti pygmies.
Hart bows deeply in gratitude to zoos in general and Brookfield, the North American center for okapi species survival efforts, in particular, for generating interest and protection for the okapi.
“Almost as soon as we began our field work on the okapi in the Ituri forest, George Rabb (Brookfield’s director) came out to see what we were doing and encourage us,” Hart says. “He and the zoo have been big supporters ever since.”
In fact, they were hired to do okapi field research by the Wildlife Conservation Society, formerly known as the New York Zoological Society, which operates the Bronx Zoo. The Harts were selected because they had already spent several years doing research in that part of Africa, she as a botanist, he as a zoologist.
“I had already been in the Ituri forest for 2 1/2 years when we got this chance to study the okapi there,” says Terese Hart, “but I had never seen one, they hide themselves so well.”
Though related to giraffes–they share a skull type; long, limber tongue; and long, prehensile lips that grasp and strip leaves from trees and shrubs–they look very little like their long-necked cousins. With brown coats that bear stripes around the legs and buttocks, okapis for many years were thought to be zebras.
Not that many people ever saw much of them. Never very numerous, only about 4,000 or fewer okapis live in the 5,000-square-mile reserve set up for them in 1992, and perhaps only 15,000 or so live in the wild altogether.
Most big forest mammals live along the edges of the woods, next to open savannas where abundant sunshine helps grow many varieties of edible plants. Only the okapi prefers to live in the deep, dark interior of the forest, where its color and markings make it nearly invisible, feeding on brushy plants and leaves that most other animals would never eat.
“Even the Africans who live in the forest know the okapi very little, if at all,” Hart says. “They are too big for the pygmies to hunt, and villagers never see them. Leopards are their one big, serious predator, unless, of course, loggers start coming in and cutting down their forest.”
With an almost constant din of screeching birds and monkeys, the Ituri forest, Hart said, is a noisy place to follow the very quiet okapi. The Harts spent a dozen years finding individual okapi, putting radio collars on some to track the territory each occupied, how it moved and what plants it ate.
The animals are, they discovered, intensely private, getting together only at mating times, avoiding all contact with all other animals, including other okapis, most of the year.
When a calf is born, the mother hides it away in deep underbrush so she can wander part of the day foraging for food needed to keep her lactating and nursing the baby. For its first two months, the calf does not defecate, lest the odor attract a lurking leopard. At one year, the calf is forced to go off and take up its own, solitary existence.
That sort of information is invaluable to zoos that keep and study okapis.
“Once we saw how solitary they are,” said Ann Petric, a Brookfield mammal curator who works closely with the zoo’s five okapis, “we began separating ours into different habitats, and they seem more content. Some of the things the Harts have shown us about maternal behavior has helped immensely. Zoo infant mortality for okapis, which used to be high, dropped off considerably.”
Some zoos, for example, used to worry so much when their newborn calves failed to poop that they gave them laxatives, sometimes with fatal results.
Brookfield has had 25 okapi births, 19 of them successful, through the years. Though never as popular with the public as more charismatic animals at the zoo, like elephants, dolphins, gorillas and walruses, they get plenty of attention and interest from Brookfield’s keepers.
During their stay here, the Harts are working with the Brookfield staff in planning a new, $5.3 million African habitat scheduled to open early in 2000 at the zoo. It will be based on the Ituri forest, designed expressly around the okapi.
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