---
title: "Baby giraffes drop about 6 feet at birth, then grow roughly an inch a day in their first week"
url: https://badiyaa.com/baby-giraffe-birth-drop-growth/
published: 2026-11-12T12:18:00+00:00
modified: 2026-11-12T12:18:00+00:00
section: Pets & Animals
publisher: Badiyaa
---

# Baby giraffes drop about 6 feet at birth, then grow roughly an inch a day in their first week

Baby giraffes fall about six feet when they are born, can run within hours and grow roughly an inch a day in their first week, zoo keepers say.

A baby giraffe’s first experience of the world is a fall of roughly six feet. Giraffe mothers give birth standing up, so the calf slides out front legs and head first and drops to the ground, a jolt that snaps the umbilical cord and gets the newborn breathing.

It sounds brutal, but the calf is built for it. Within a few hours it is up and running, and keepers at the San Diego Zoo say young giraffes then grow about an inch every single day during their first week.

## A tall baby from day one

According to the [giraffe article on Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giraffe), a newborn stands 1.7 to 2 meters tall, about 5 feet 7 inches to 6 feet 7 inches, which makes many calves taller than the adults watching them arrive. The San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance puts the average height at birth at more than 6 feet.

That height comes after a long wait. Pregnancy lasts 400 to 460 days, about 15 months, and usually ends with a single calf; twins are rare. Adult giraffes eventually stand 4.3 to 5.7 meters (14 to 19 feet) tall, so a newborn already has roughly a third of its grown-up height on the day it is born.

## The six-foot drop, as zoo visitors saw it

One of the best-documented births happened in public. On December 13, 2015, a Masai giraffe named Nicky gave birth on exhibit at the San Diego Zoo’s Urban Jungle area after about an hour and a half of labor, which the zoo described as short for a giraffe. Its account says the crowd gasped as the wet calf dropped six feet head first, then cheered when he stood and took his first wobbly steps.

That calf, Obi, turned out to be unusually small at 5 feet 3 inches and 117 pounds, the smallest giraffe born at the zoo in 15 years, even though his father Silver weighed 2,585 pounds. Senior keeper Katie Tomlinson, who is 5 feet 5 inches, said in the zoo’s account: “having a chance to be taller than a giraffe, even for a very short time, was very exciting.”

## How fast baby giraffes grow

Obi’s numbers show the pace. At three months he weighed more than 270 pounds and stood just under 7 feet. Working from the zoo’s figures, that is a gain of roughly 20 inches and more than 150 pounds in about 90 days, or close to a quarter of an inch and nearly two pounds a day on average after the first-week growth spurt.

The timeline for a typical calf, drawn from the zoo account and Wikipedia, looks like this:

- **Birth:** a drop of about six feet; the calf stands roughly 5.5 to 6.5 feet tall.

- **First hours:** standing, nursing and able to run.

- **First few days:** the ossicones, the horn-like knobs that lay flat in the womb, rise up.

- **First week:** growth of about an inch a day.

- **One to three weeks:** mostly hiding, relying on its spotted coat as camouflage.

- **Four to six months:** starts chewing cud like an adult.

- **Six to eight months:** stops nursing.

- **Around 14 months:** may leave its mother and strike out alone.

## Nursery herds and babysitters

In the wild, mothers with young calves often band together in nursery groups. Sometimes one female watches several calves while the other mothers go off to feed and drink, an arrangement researchers call a calving pool. A mother will stand over her calf and kick at predators such as lions that come too close.

Giraffe births at zoos draw big audiences online. Badiyaa covered the [Cincinnati Zoo’s round-the-clock livestream of giraffe Tessa](https://badiyaa.com/cincinnati-zoo-tessa-giraffe-birth-livestream/) as her calf was due, and lions with their own young at a [floodlit Namibian waterhole near Etosha](https://badiyaa.com/lioness-cubs-waterhole-etosha-heights-namibia/).

Obi’s herd shows how quickly a newcomer catches up. Domibella, a calf just seven months older, was already a few feet taller and much bulkier when he arrived, and the zoo says its Safari Park breeding program has produced more than 164 giraffe calves since 1972.

## Further reading

- [Wikipedia: Giraffe](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giraffe)

*Image: Bernard DUPONT, CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons*

*This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by our Editorial Desk. [How we work](https://badiyaa.com/editorial-policy/).*