Cheet-aww! New cubs need a name

Parents Nimpy and Sam need your help!

Mother Nimpy and father Sam have three Northern cheetah cubs who were recently born at Fota Wildlife Park but have no name. Fota is now calling on the public to help name the cubs via an online survey on their blog at fotawildlife.ie/blog and are offering a chance to win one of three year-long Conversation annual passes to the Park.

The cubs, one male and two females were born on 10 June and have only recently started venturing out of their cubbing den and have spent the last few days enjoying the mild weather playing together in the grass and on the logs of their habitat - in an area known as Cheetah Hill in Fota.

The cubs' mother Nimpy is 10 years old and was born in Parc Zoologique de La Palmyre in France and the father Sam is four years old and was born in Wadi Al Safa Wildlife Centre in Dubai. Sam arrived in Fota in 2017 and has had two other litters of cubs this year.

Nimpy and Sam are part of the European Association of Zoos and Aquaria Northern cheetah breeding programme.

Lead ranger Julien Fonteneau said: “We are delighted to be announcing a second litter of Northern cheetah cubs since re-opening in May. Without a doubt, the Northern cheetah is the most successful breeding programme here at Fota and the species has become synonymous with the park - it’s even on our logo. We put that breeding success down to the naturalistic habitats and environments that we create for the animals.”

The birth of these cubs brings the total for this endangered species born in Fota to 204. The International Union for the Conservation of Nature has classified the subspecies status for the Northern cheetah as endangered.

A 2017 expert report on the decline of the cheetah suggested that in the natural range of the species, there were fewer than 2,800 left in the wild in the whole of East and North Africa.

The Asiatic cheetah is critically endangered in Iran with less than 40 animals left in the wild.