A beloved fixture at Saint John’s Cherry Brook Zoo will soon be packing up her pen and heading west so she can be matched up with a new mate.
Karma, a five-year-old Siberian tiger, is relocating to the Calgary Zoo where she will be placed with a male tiger in the hopes of producing offspring.
“We go by stud numbers. That’s how we track all the animals internationally,” says zoo development director Lynda Collrin. “Karma has risen to the top of the stud book in the SSP [Species Survival Plan] program and has been selected to be a breeder for a new-founding bloodline.”
Collrin says it’s important to create new bloodlines with Siberian tigers because there are so few left.
“Highly endangered, they’re extremely rare, maybe 200 left in the wild,” she says. “There’s actually more being held in zoos than there is that live in the wild.”
The zoo will say goodbye to Karma in September, but they will be welcoming a new Siberian tiger named Kiera the same day, making for a busy time for zoo staff.
“We’ll do a transfer. That means we have to get her out and into a transfer cage and get that one out of the transfer cage and into the enclosure and it’s something that you lay out,” says Collrin. “You don’t get to say ‘Oh, the tiger’s here, let’s go.’ It’s carefully planned.”
Staff have already started making plans for that day, and while they’re excited to welcome a new animal to the zoo, Karma’s departure will be bittersweet.
“So this is for us kind of a sad time because we are professionals. This is what our business is,” says Collrin. “We hate to see her go, but at the same time, we have to be so very proud of the work we have done here in propagating and keeping Siberian tiger lines going.”
Zoo staff say they will still be keeping a close eye on Karma once she is transported to Calgary and meets up with her new mate.
With files from CTV Atlantic's Ashley Blackford
