Zoo pair prove love ain't 'aard!
Wednesday 10 February 2010
Romeo and Juliet, Anthony and Cleopatra, Posh and Becks... and Kiyo and Misha? All classic couples have a story - here's our aardvarks'!
Born in separate zoos but brought together by fate, Kiyo and Misha, our loved-up pair of aardvarks live within Animal Adventure at ZSL London Zoo.
Their worlds collided when our curators carefully studied their studbooks, which contain their family history, and considered them a perfect match. And they got it right! They have been inseparable ever since they moved here in November 2008.
Incredibly lucky visitors can sometimes see one of them having a stretch and walking around their purpose-built love den. However, you’d be forgiven for thinking that our aardvarks are lazy, as they spend lots of their time all snuggled up together.
Being nocturnal animals, its during the night that the amorous pair come into their own. Keepers arrive most mornings to find huge burrows in their enclosure. They’re not trying to escape, they’re just natural diggers – that’s why they have such big, unusually shaped feet.
Zoo visitors can get to live like an aardvark, as their enclosure was designed with some human-sized tunnels. A short crawl through and you can pop up in the middle. It’s the perfect position to get up close to not only Kiyo and Misha, but also their meerkat roommates.
Say it with an aardvark
So if you want to show someone special how you feel this Valentine’s Day, whilst also supporting ZSL’s vital conservation work – then say it with an Aardvark!
Our fantastic online adoptions are only £30 each for 1 year.
Adopters get a great range of benefits including a free e-ticket to come and visit their animal, access to exclusive videos and pictures, downloadable e-certificate plus subscription to Wild About magazine and regular email updates, so they can keep track of what their animal has been up to.
