Red Kangaroo Gives Birth to Extremely Rare White Joey at Animal Adventure Park

The Animal Adventure Park is home to an extremely rare kangaroo.

Rosie, a red kangaroo that came to the park last year, gave birth to what park officials are calling a leucistic male joey.

Leucistic is the lack of color pigmentation, resulting in a white coat. Although it's similar to albino, leucistic animals have black color pigmentation in the eyes, instead of red-eyed albino mutation.

Red kangaroos are born the size of your thumbnail, and do much of their development in mom's pouch, outside of the womb, park officials explained. "At the age of approximately 4-5 months, we do our first full pull, removing baby from mom's pouch for a full inspection and medical review, and then return the joey to mom's pouch for her to raise."

This new joey at Animal Adventure Park in Harpursville, New York may be the only one of its kind in the country. "We are not aware of any leucistic red kangaroo in the United States; proving just how rare this occurrence is. We are now working with professionals in the zoological community to see just how unique of a blessing this little one is," said park officials.

Animal Adventure Park is home to April the Giraffe, who captured world-wide attention in 2017 when she gave birth. She continues to welcome visitors for off-season giraffe encounters while enjoying a new home. A new state of the art flooring system, used by only a few of the biggest name zoos in the country was recently installed. The new flooring system provides the comfort equivalence of over 10 inches of traditional sawdust bedding. "It will be like walking on a cloud, for our very deserving girl," said the park.

To learn more on the animal encounters and the park visit AnimalAdventurePark.com. Take a virtual tour with us, when we visited the park a few years ago.