OTTAWA CITIZEN (Ontario) 21 February 05 Owen and Mzee -- the oddest couple: A baby hippopotamus who lost his mother, has adopted a wrinkly old male tortoise as her replacement (Robyn Dixon, Los Angeles Times)
Mombasa, Kenya: For a panic-stricken baby hippo, lost and far from home, the sight of a wrinkly, rotund old male tortoise must have suggested something very different: Are you my mother?
Owen, the hippo, sought refuge behind the tortoise just after Christmas, and weeks later, they are together, safe and warm. Owen looks like a character in a children's book, his eyes closed blissfully as he snuggles down in a mud puddle near a reptile 130 years his senior.
In the wild, hippos are sociable creatures who live in close-knit groups. But this bonding of mammal and reptile has surprised the experts.
The details of Owen's adventure are not entirely clear, but it seems to have begun when a group of hippos were swept from the river where they lived and into the open sea. They are believed to have made their way back, but Owen got separated.
Alone, he spent several days wallowing helplessly in the salt water before the Kenyan wildlife service and area fishermen wrapped him in a fishing net and put him in a truck to be taken away.
The capture and the noisy crowd that watched must have unnerved Owen. When he was set loose in Haller Wildlife Park outside Mombasa in an enclosure with two giant tortoises and some bushbucks, he bolted to the giant tortoise named Mzee, or Old Man, and hid.
"When he arrived, he was completely exhausted and stressed. He got up and started staggering around a bit and then he went straight for the tortoise. We never expected something like this," said Sabine Baer, rehabilitation and ecosystems manager at Lafarge Eco Systems, which runs the park.
"A mammal with a mammal, yes it happens. But reptiles and mammals, we haven't seen this," she said. "We were all quite amazed to see how fast it happened."
Owen, thought to be about a year old, was only partially weaned when he was separated from his mother.
Hippos often lie around in groups and rest their heads on one another. Now, Owen likes to rest his head on the giant tortoise. He licks Mzee, and has been seen to gently put his mouth around the tortoise's head in what Mr. Baer said looks like a form of play. He spends most of the day in the mud pond with Mzee. Sometimes, he calls out to the other tortoises.
"He walks behind the tortoise. He goes to sleep next to the tortoise," Mr. Baer said. "When he wants to go into the water, he nudges the tortoise and licks it as if to say, 'Come on, let's go into the water,' walks off a little bit, and then looks around and comes back to see if the tortoise understands.
Hippos can live to about 60 years in captivity, and at 265 pounds, Owen is capable of inflicting significant damage. But, Owen can't go back to a group of wild hippos. The males are very territorial and would kill him, Mr. Baer said.
While Owen is clearly attached to Mzee, it's more difficult to tell how much of the affection is reciprocated. Mzee at least tolerates him.
Park staff are planning to separate the pair. At some point, they will move Owen in with a lonely 12-year-old female named Cleo and hope the two will breed.