Sibu Junior turns 2 months old!

The infant orangutan born in Dublin Zoo turns 2 months old this week, and he is thriving thanks to the round-the-clock care he has received from the team. We can’t believe how big he’s getting!

Sibu Junior, or SJ as he is affectionately known by the Dublin Zoo team, will be leaving the Zoo to grow up with other young orangutans at a specialist orangutan nursery facility in the UK in the coming weeks.

Every effort was made to keep mum Mujur and SJ together following his birth, however Mujur was unable to feed her infant. Given orangutan infants are entirely dependent in their formative years, this led to the difficult decision to separate SJ from Mujur and begin bottle-feeding him before transferring him to a specialist facility which can provide the best long-term care for his development.

The separation has naturally been challenging for Mujur, and Dublin Zoo’s animal care team has been providing dedicated support to help her through this time while allowing her to cope with the absence of her infant.

As with human infants, SJ requires constant care and attention, including round-the-clock bottle-feeding and nappy-changing. The Dublin Zoo team has been taking turns to look after SJ in shifts, including Director Christoph Schwitzer and his wife Nora, who have been re-experiencing late night bottle feeds and nappy changes that they thought were a thing of the distant past!

SJ is healthy and making excellent progress, and although everyone at Dublin Zoo will be sad to see him leave in a few weeks’ time, we are confident the move to the orangutan nursery in the UK is the right decision for his development and we can’t wait to follow his progress from afar.