Biology and management of ungulates: Brookfield Zoo helps restore addax antelope herds -- chicagotribune.com

Brookfield Zoo helps restore addax antelope herds

Big plans rest on baby antelope at Brookfield Zoo

Chad, a 10-week-old addax, hangs out in his pen at Brookfield Zoo. Chad, sickly from birth, has been hand-raised by the zoo in an effort to keep him alive. (Chicago Tribune / August 27, 2009)

Weak and near death when he was born at Brookfield Zoo, a baby antelope named Chad now carries big hopes on his little shoulders that he will grow up to help save his species by siring lots of calves.
"He had a rough start when he was born," Joan Daniels, the zoo's associate mammal curator, said as she watched the now-robust 10-week-old bound across his grassy enclosure to a keeper holding out special formula in nippled bottles.
Daniels said keepers decided to take Chad from his mother soon after birth so they could hand-rear him.
"I am quite sure he would have died because normally they stand up within the first hour," she said. "That was the only reason we intervened."
Chad is an addax, an endangered type of antelope from the Sahara Desert, which is so dry that the species has learned to go years without drinking water, living off moisture in plants.
And they face extinction not because of lost habitat, like so many other species, but because of the arrival of ATVs and automatic weapons in the desert after World War II.
Saving Chad, Daniels said, is important because the genes he inherited from his father are rare among the 197 addax living in North American zoos. His offspring, therefore, would be important for increasing the genetic diversity of zoo addax.
Now only about 300 are left in the wild, 200 in one corner of Niger, the rest scattered in tiny, fast-disappearing herds.