Baby Animal Names: What Young Animals Are Called

Baby animal names table

Why do so many animals share baby names?

English took most of its baby animal words from farm and household animals, then stretched them to cover wild animals that looked or behaved similarly. Calf, the word for a young cow, was extended to almost every large, hoofed or bulky mammal, from elephants and giraffes to whales. Cub became the word for many young carnivores, pup for dogs and their relatives as well as seals and bats, and kit for small furry mammals such as foxes and beavers.

Other names are built with small-word endings that mean “little.” Duckling and gosling use -ling, owlet and piglet use -let, and eaglet uses -et. A few names come from other languages: cygnet is from an Old French word for swan, leveret from a French diminutive of the word for hare, and cria from the Spanish verb criar, “to raise.”

Calves: from cows to whales

A calf can be a newborn cow weighing a few dozen kilograms or a giant. An elephant calf is born after a pregnancy of about 22 months, the longest of any mammal, and a newborn giraffe calf is already 1.7–2 m (5.6–6.6 ft) tall. Whale and dolphin calves are born underwater, usually tail first, and must swim to the surface for their first breath almost at once.

Cubs, pups and kits

Bears, lions, tigers and sometimes foxes have cubs. Many are born small and helpless: a newborn black bear cub weighs only about 280–450 g (10–16 oz), and a giant panda cub about 90–130 g (3–4.5 oz), roughly 1/900 of its mother’s weight. Our guide to what a baby bear is called explains how cubs grow in the winter den.

Pups include young dogs, wolves, seals, bats and even some sharks. Kit is a shortened form of kitten, used for young foxes, beavers, ferrets, skunks and rabbits.

Joeys: baby marsupials

Every baby marsupial, from a kangaroo to a koala or wombat, is a joey. Marsupials are born extremely early. A red kangaroo joey is born after only about 33 days of pregnancy, no bigger than a jelly bean, and climbs through its mother’s fur into the pouch in about three to five minutes. There it fastens onto a teat and grows for months, leaving the pouch for good at around 235 days but still drinking milk until it is about a year old. Read more in what is a baby kangaroo called?

Fawns, foals, kids and lambs

Hoofed mammals usually have well-developed young that can stand and walk soon after birth. A young deer is a fawn; its white spots help it stay hidden in dappled vegetation while its mother feeds nearby. A young horse is a foal, more precisely a colt if male or a filly if female, and most foals stand within about an hour; see what is a baby horse called? Goats have kids, sheep have lambs, and llamas and alpacas have crias.

A young hare is a leveret. Leverets are born fully furred with their eyes open, ready to sit still in a shallow hollow on open ground, while baby rabbits, called kits or kittens, are born naked and blind in a burrow. The difference is explained in what is a baby hare called?

Cygnets, eyases and other baby birds

Most baby birds are simply chicks. Hatchlings have just left the egg, nestlings are still in the nest, and fledglings have their first flight feathers and are learning to fly. Many groups also have special names. A baby swan is a cygnet: mute swan cygnets are usually gray or buff, keep a dull gray-black bill through their first year and are close to adult size about three months after hatching. Young geese are goslings, young owls are owlets, young turkeys are poults and young pigeons are squabs.

An eyas is a young hawk or falcon still in the nest. The word comes from falconry and began as “a nyas,” from the old French niais, meaning fresh from the nest; over time “a nyas” was misheard as “an eyas.”

Puggles: baby echidnas and platypuses

A baby echidna is a puggle. Echidnas are egg-laying mammals: the female lays a single soft-shelled egg directly into her pouch, where it hatches after about ten days. The tiny puggle laps milk from patches of skin, because echidnas have no nipples, and stays in the pouch for about seven weeks until its spines start to grow. There is no official word for a baby platypus, but people sometimes borrow “puggle” for it too. See what is a baby echidna called?

Tadpoles, elvers and other young that change shape

Some young animals look nothing like their parents and change completely as they grow, a process called metamorphosis. A young frog or toad is a tadpole, a water-dwelling larva with gills and a tail. Most frogs finish changing within weeks or months, but some species, such as the American bullfrog, can stay tadpoles for more than a year.

Eels have one of the strangest life cycles. European eels are thought to spawn in the Sargasso Sea, and their flat, leaf-shaped larvae drift across the Atlantic. Near the coast they turn into transparent glass eels, and once they darken and start to swim up rivers they are called elvers. They then become yellow eels and, finally, silver eels that return to the ocean to breed.

Insects have their own terms. Butterflies and moths start as caterpillars, beetles as grubs and flies as maggots, while grasshoppers and dragonflies hatch as nymphs that look like small, wingless adults. Young fish are fry and then fingerlings, and young oysters that settle on a hard surface are called spat.

Born ready or born helpless?

Biologists sort babies into two broad types. Precocial young, such as foals, giraffe calves, leverets and ducklings, are born or hatch with fur or down and open eyes, and can move about within hours. Altricial young, such as kittens, puppies, bear cubs, baby rabbits and most songbird chicks, are born blind and helpless and need weeks of care. Marsupial joeys are the extreme example, finishing most of their development inside the pouch. For the names of groups rather than babies, see our list of animal group names.