I admit, I didn’t watch the live cam as obsessively this time around, but it is still a fascinating thing to see a giraffe drop a new baby from 6 feet up in the air.

Internet star April the Giraffe gave birth live for the second time on Saturday. March 16th, 2019. April went into labor at 11 AM EST and gave birth shortly before 1 PM at Animal Adventure Park in upstate Harpursville, New York.

April first became a viral sensation in 2017, when Animal Adventure created a live stream to track the progress of the 18-foot-tall pregnant giraffe. You can watch that live stream by clicking HERE. 

At its peek in 2017. the park’s YouTube channel drew nearly five million viewers a day.

Interesting giraffe facts include:

• Giraffes are the tallest mammals on Earth. Their legs alone are taller than many humans, about 6 feet.
• Giraffes spend most of their lives standing up; they even sleep and give birth standing up
• Giraffes only need 5 to 30 minutes of sleep in a 24-hour period. They often achieve that in quick naps that may last only a minute or two at a time.
• The giraffe calf can stand up and walk after about an hour and within a week, it starts to sample vegetation
• The gestation period for a human is 9 months, but for a giraffe, it’s 15-16 months.
• Approximately 90,000 giraffe remain in the wild, with an estimation of 1,200 in captive breeding/management programs
• Giraffe are now listed as ‘vulnerable to extinction’ on the IUCN Red List

Susan Saunders 3/18/19