Yukon Wildlife Preserve 'hand-raising' baby muskox after complicated birth

It's baby season at the wildlife preserve near Whitehorse, but one little creature has required a little more help than the rest — a muskox calf, who's being bottle-fed by the animal care team after his mother had health complications after birth.

While the calf himself was healthy after being born at the end of April, Yukon Wildlife Preserve executive director Jake Paleczny said the calf's mother had a retained placenta, where the organ doesn't fully and properly expel itself. 

That meant the mother continued to have contractions after giving birth, which made her uncomfortable, and she didn't allow the calf to feed after he was born. 

"That first feeding in the early hours is really important and at a certain point, you know, it was becoming clear that this wasn't going to happen," Paleczny said, adding that other muskox were starting to "investigate" the calf and knock him over with their horns.

"We ended up having to intervene and so we're now bottle-raising, hand-raising this little baby muskox." 

Both the calf and the mother, neither of which have names, are doing well now, Paleczny said, but the initial separation meant the pair never got to have a "critical early bonding period." 

Instead, the preserve's animal care team has had to step into the parenting role, sustaining the now almost four-week-old-calf on a special formula — he gets his first bottle of the day at 6 a.m., and the last one at 7 p.m. — while introducing solid food in the form of pellets. 

The calf is also being kept in a pen separate from, but adjacent to, the rest of the herd's muskox herd, with the care team planning to allow him to gradually mingle with and eventually fully rejoin his peers — something both sides seem to be interested in.

"We've been seeing them coming up to the fence and checking each other out," Paleczny said. "There was some nervousness at first, even some of the adults running away as the baby came up — it's this unusual situation."

The calf, Paleczny said, will have "a little door that he can come and go" from the herd's pen because "there are a lot of big animals in there," and is still getting food that the rest of the herd doesn't have access to. 

The care team, meanwhile, is trying to limit interactions with the calf to prevent him getting too accustomed to humans. 

"We want him to be a fully-fledged, functioning member of this muskox herd, not, you know, a person, a human in muskox form," Paleczny said. 

Besides the muskox, the preserve has also seen the birth of bison and elk calves this spring, with mule deer and thin-horn sheep expected to be born in the coming weeks. Some caribou calves and mountain goat kids could be on their way too. 

Paleczny said the preserve's animals are largely able to have successful births and raise their young without intervention, with the muskox being the only baby the care team has had to help this year. 

The calf, on Tuesday morning, was alert and curious, running around his pen and following a caregiver as he topped up the pen's water and pellets. He weighed 12 kilograms, double his birth weight but still a far cry from his final size — male muskox can reach more than 350 kilograms when fully grown and stand five feet tall at the shoulder.

For now, though, the calf is closer to the size of a small dog, little more than a ball of black-and-brown fluff zooming around his enclosure or napping in a pile of hay. 

"On a scale of one to 10," Paleczny acknowledged, "this guy is 11 on cuteness."