Mum Emma successfully delivered her baby on Sunday after an eight-and-a-half-month pregnancy and is a major success for the zoo’s acclaimed international breeding programme. Tony McDonough reports

Chester Zoo is celebrating the birth of an extremely rare baby orangutan just days before Christmas.

The tiny Sumatran orangutan was delivered safely by 30-year-old mum Emma after an eight-and-a-half-month pregnancy. Amazing film footage taken by the zoo captured precious early moments, showing the new arrival clinging on tightly to its mum.

It is too early for keepers to determine the gender of the new baby, whose dad is 30-year-old Puluh, so a name has not yet been chosen.

Click to see a video of the orangutan’s first moments

The birth is major success story for the acclaimed international breeding programme for the highly threatened species.

Sumatran orangutans are listed as critically endangered by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) with fewer than 6,500 estimated to be left in the wild, so every birth is important.

Nick Davis, Chester Zoo’s deputy curator of mammals, said: “It is very early days, but the baby looks very healthy and is bonding well with mum in these precious first few hours. It is wonderful to have a tiny new infant in our family of stunning Sumatran orangutans.

“It’s now important that this fantastic new arrival helps draw some much needed attention to the species. The Sumatran orangutan is under enormous pressure in the wild and, without urgent conservation work, it could tragically become the first great ape lost forever. We can’t allow that to happen.”

Sumatran orangutans are among the many species being pushed to the brink of extinction in South East Asia by, hunting, forest clearance and the planting of oil palm plantations, which are wiping out huge areas of rainforest.

There is intense demand for the oil, which features in thousands of household products in the UK from food to cleaning materials and cosmetics.

Chester Zoo is also leading the way on a major campaign to make Chester the world’s first ‘Sustainable Palm Oil City.’ Zoo conservationists are working with restaurants, cafes, hotels, fast food outlets, schools and workplaces in the city to introduce sustainable palm oil policies into their supply chain.