Will Cincy rhino be New Year’s baby?

CINCINNATI (AP) — Nikki’s baby is late.

The Cincinnati Zoo expected Nikki, a 15-year-old Indian rhino, to give birth around Christmas Day to the world’s first Indian rhino conceived by artificial insemination.

She missed that date — which is her birthday — but could deliver at any time, zoo spokesman Chad Yelton said Friday. A birth this weekend would still make quite a holiday at the zoo.

“Six cameras have been set up to record the birth,” Yelton said.

When the zoo announced Nikki’s pregnancy in July, Rhino experts counted forward and pegged the delivery date for Christmas week. But as with any species, predicting a birth date is not an exact science, Yelton noted.

The gestation period for a rhino — 16 months — makes it even more difficult.

Zoo volunteers are keeping a round-the-clock watch on Nikki, the first Indian rhino impregnated with sperm that had been frozen and stored.

Semen was collected from Himal, a male Indian rhino at the Wilds preserve in southeast Ohio, in November 2004. Zoo workers had to design and make the equipment to harvest the sperm and deposit it in Nikki’s uterus.

In August 2006, in their fourth attempt, the Cincinnati Zoo team succeeded in inseminating Nikki.

Indian rhinos are native to northern India and southern Nepal and weigh up to 6,000 pounds when fully grown. Only about 200 remained before tough preservation laws began to be stringently enforced in the 20th century, experts say. Now there are an estimated 2,500 in the wild.

Rhinos can be hard to breed naturally because they can be aggressive and fight rather than mate. The Cincinnati Zoo, known for its breeding program in several species, is where the first Sumatran rhino bred in captivity in more than a century gave birth in 2001.

That rhino, named Emi, gave birth to her third calf in April. No other rhino has given birth to more than one calf while in captivity, the zoo said.

Emi’s first calf, Andalus, now 5, was sent to Indonesia in February to help repopulate the species there.