Director Barbara Menard gathered with zoo donors and patrons at the Zoofari Party Area on Saturday morning, December 6, 2014 to enjoy interacting with the animals and updates on the renovations at the San Diego Zoo. They discussed the expansion of San Diego Zoo Kids in Colorado Children’s Hospital in Denver, funded through a generous gift by businessman and philanthropist T. Denny Sanford. San Diego Zoo Kids is a television broadcast channel that features programming about unique and endangered animal species and is available on TV monitors in every patient room in Children’s Hospital. The channel features video from the Zoo’s famous Panda Cam as well as other live, online cameras, fun and educational pieces about a variety of animals and up-close video encounters of popular animals with the Zoo’s national spokesperson, Rick Schwartz.
Pictures were shared of the four cheetah cubs as they ran, climbed and played in their new habitat at the San Diego Zoo Safari Park. The young felines chase birds and each other, eventually resting alongside their mother, who groomed and nursed them, before the felines’ playtime started over again. Their attentive mother kept a close watch over the cubs and vocalized with a loud chirp when they ventured too far out of her view. The almost four-month-old cheetah cubs, two males and two females, were born to first-time mother Addison on July 13 at the Safari Park’s off-site cheetah breeding center. The little family moved to their new habitat at the Safari Park’s Okavango Outpost in November 2014.