CHESTER — Keepers at Chester zoo have provided round-the-clock bottle feeding and incubator care to a newborn aardvark calf nicknamed Womble after its mother failed to produce enough milk. The calf, now seven weeks old and weighing about 7kg, is the second aardvark born at the zoo in its 94-year history.

The calf was healthy at birth, weighing 1.4kg, but its 13-year-old mother Oni was not producing enough milk to fully feed it, prompting staff to step in. The team first suspected Oni was pregnant after noticing her weight changes, and an ultrasound confirmed she was further along than expected. For several weeks, zookeeper Sophie Tyson fed Womble warm milk every few hours while Oni left the den to forage. The calf was placed in a heated incubator each night and returned to its mother each morning. Tyson had worked with aardvarks for three and a half years before caring for her first calf.

"I came into work one morning and was lucky enough to find a little calf," Tyson said, recalling the birth.

Describing the weeks of overnight feeds, she said, "It was really exciting, and really tiring. You'd get an hour's sleep in between feeds, and then you were back up again feeding."

Womble and Oni are now living together full-time. Tyson said aardvarks remained challenging to breed in captivity and that the parents had been housed together for a long time but never bred. Births of aardvarks are extremely rare in captivity. The last calf born at Chester zoo arrived in 2022, and according to the zoo, Womble is believed to be the only aardvark calf born in the UK since 2024. According to Chester zoo, there are 68 aardvarks in European zoos and 114 worldwide.

The sex of the calf is still unknown because the genitalia of young aardvarks are difficult to distinguish so soon after birth. Aardvarks are nocturnal mammals native to sub-Saharan Africa, spending most of the day underground and emerging at night in search of food. They use their claws, long snout and a sticky tongue up to 25cm long to dig into soil to feed on ants and termites. The name "aardvark" means "earth pig" in Afrikaans. Despite their similar appearance to anteaters and armadillos, aardvarks are not closely related to them.