Tundana Update: January 2026

Written by John Lukas

Tundana is an exceptionally beautiful female okapi

I am in Epulu for at least a month working with staff on OCP’s Annual Work Plan and Project Budget for 2026. While at our base camp I go to visit Tundana every day. She is doing fantastic, very calm, eating and drinking normally and her body condition is excellent.

Tundana is curious about people in her enclosure even follows staff around when they are cleaning up her feces or cutting grass with machetes. She is very playful running with her head down, tail up and jumping as moves through the trees. She is eating around 50 lbs. of leaves a day that are provided for her by the Mbuti and continues to browse the young leaves of trees in the enclosure.   

Tundana in play posture

Tundana eating leaves in the afternoon which she will finish them all by morning.

Okapi are ruminants and thrive totally on a diet of leaves from rainforest trees. They belong to a group of even-toed mammals that chew their cud i.e. deer, antelope, giraffes, sheep, cattle and camels. They all share a four chambered stomach of which the first chamber acts as a holding tank where fermentation can occur and from which the food is regurgitated and rechewed further breaking down the cell walls making the material within the cells available for further digestion. Ruminants have been very successful colonizing most terrestrial habitats from the arctic to tropical forests as a result of evolving into the ultimate plant eating group of mammals. Another advantage as important as accessing food no other mammal can process is that ruminants can eat a lot of forage quickly then retreat to an area with protective cover to work on rechewing what they just consumed. Okapi spend a lot of time chewing their cud in a quiet, safe place using their camouflage to remain hidden among the dense forest understory.

Tundana ruminating in the shade.