Warsaw Zoo is home to four grown Baringo giraffes, also known as Rothschild’s giraffes: one male and three females. After 15 months of pregnancy, one of them, Justyna, gave birth to a female calf on July 9, although the zoo withheld its announcement for almost a month. At birth, the calf was ca. 175 centimeters tall and weighed 49 kilograms, according to the state news agency PAP.

All animals born in the zoo in a given year are given names beginning with the same letter of the alphabet. This year it is the letter ‘P’ and so the baby giraffe was named Pietruszka, Polish for parsley.

Sadly, Justyna did not accept her offspring.

“Justyna cleaned her up after the birth, but about an hour later, when Pietruszka got up and tried to latch on, Justyna rejected her,” Magdalena Smolińska of the Warsaw Zoo told TVP World’s reporter Gabriela Fesnak. “She was scared and kept kicking Pietruszka. Unfortunately, this happens both in the wild and in captivity, more often in zoos.”

This forced the zookeepers to separate Pietruszka from her mother and nurse her themselves. Although a demanding task that required someone to watch over the calf at all times, Pietruszka got used to being bottle-fed and continues to grow day by day.