See baby meerkats exploring outside of their nest box for the first time at the Symbio Wildlife Park in Helensburgh, a town outside of Sydney in New South Wales, Australia.
Our meerkats ‘Aya and Penfold’ celebrated the arrival of four of the cutest babies you will ever see.
We managed the capture their first steps outside of the nest box, first ever time standing up ‘in the sentry position’ and the first ever time they tasted solid food. Even a pea was too big to fit in their mouths they are so tiny.
And from Wikipedia:
Meerkats are primarily insectivores, but also eat other animals (lizards, snakes, scorpions, spiders, eggs, small mammals, millipedes, centipedes and, more rarely, small birds), plants and fungi (the desert truffle Kalaharituber pfeilii). Meerkats are immune to certain types of venom, including the very strong venom of the scorpions of the Kalahari Desert.
Baby meerkats do not start foraging for food until they are about 1 month old, and do so by following an older member of the group who acts as the pup’s tutor. Meerkats forage in a group with one “sentry” on guard watching for predators while the others search for food. Sentry duty is usually approximately an hour long. The meerkat standing guard makes peeping sounds when all is well.
The team at Symbio specializes in adorable meerkat pup videos. Check out this cute video from October 2017 of Aya and Penfold’s first litter, meerkat triplets born the previous August:
Follow these vids with this one in the wild: The secret belowground life of newborn meerkat pups.via Laughing Squid.
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