Submitted Photo This photo from the Oklahoma City Zoo shows Zoya, a female Amur tiger. The 2-year-old tiger will be arriving at Minot’s Roosevelt Park Zoo shortly.

The Oklahoma City Zoo staff is saying goodbye to Zoya, a female Amur tiger, who will be arriving at her new home at Minot’s Roosevelt Park Zoo shortly.

Jennifer Kleen, executive director of the Minot Zoo Crew, said when Zoya arrives here she will go through quarantine for a time before she can be seen by the public. She will eventually move into the new tiger facility to be opened at the zoo later this year, Kleen said.

The Minot zoo has two Amur tigers – Viktor, a 7-year-old tiger, and Krapinka, a 19-year-old tiger.

Zoya was born July 10, 2017, at Philadelphia Zoo but was rejected by her mother, according to a news release. It is not uncommon among first-time mother tigers to sometimes neglect or reject cubs. As a result, the Philadelphia zoo’s animal care team, who had been bottle-feeding and caring for the cub, knew she needed to be raised with either a mother or littermates. The Oklahoma City Zoo offered to integrate Zoya with their litter of Sumatran tiger cubs born just one day before Zoya and her siblings were born, and their female, six-year-old Sumatran tiger Lola.

Cross-fostering among tigers is rare, with only few cases having ever been attempted and documented, according to a news release.

Though Sumatran and Amur or Siberian tigers are different subspecies, they look almost identical as cubs, Oklahoma City Zoo officials said.

A team of four animal caretakers traveled with the less than 2-week-old cub across country to the Oklahoma zoo and there Zoya joined the Sumatran tiger group. As it turned out, the cub integrated well with her new adoptive mom and family.

Zoya now will be moving to Roosevelt Park Zoo as a result of a recommendation through an Association of Zoos & Aquariums-Species Survival Plan.

“Our new habitat is a major player in that recommendation. It was designed to be able to accommodate cubs,” Kleen said. “To have cubs we need to be able to accommodate them for their first two years of life, including after they wean from mom. We built the new habitat so that yard one has a smaller mesh fence on it where our cubs would spend their daytime as they get older. That smaller mesh also makes it possible to temporarily house our leopards in that space during the renovation.”