The Long Island Game Farm has four new residents, and they arrived all at once. Lily, the wildlife park's capybara matriarch, gave birth to a litter of four pups on the afternoon of Friday, September 18, and the Manorville park says mother and babies are healthy, nursing and already padding around their habitat on comically oversized feet.

The pups do not have names yet. That part, the Game Farm has decided, is Long Island's job.

A naming contest, open now

The park announced a public naming contest this week on its social channels. Anyone can enter by submitting name ideas on the announcement post, liking it and sharing it. A panel of zoo staff will read through the suggestions and vote on the winners, and the people behind the chosen names get a real prize: an exclusive capybara encounter for the winner and a guest, up close with the new pups themselves.

If the early comments are any guide, the staff has a long read ahead. Within an hour of the post going up, suggestions were already stacking up, from Churro and Biscuit to Capycinno, that last one credited to an entrant's 8-year-old. The park had so many ideas rolling in from an earlier round that it decided to run a full contest rather than pick quietly in the back office.

Lily and Dilly are on a roll

For the Game Farm's capybara program, this is becoming a habit. Lily and her mate Dilly welcomed their first litter, five pups, on November 8 of last year. Ten months later they have doubled down with four more, which puts the pair at nine babies in under a year and makes the Manorville park one of the busier capybara nurseries in the Northeast.

The park saw this litter coming and turned even the wait into a community event. In late August, after a vet visit confirmed Lily was expecting, the Game Farm invited followers to guess the birth date, with a VIP capybara encounter for whoever came closest. Park president Melinda Novak has said that watching Lily with her new litter has been a joy for the whole team, describing her as an attentive, devoted mother whose pups are already out exploring.

Capybaras, for anyone who has not fallen down that particular corner of the internet, are the largest rodents in the world, native to South America, where they laze in wetlands in big social groups. Adults can top 100 pounds. They are famously calm, famously social and famously good with just about every other species, which is a large part of why they have become the internet's favorite animal, and why a litter of four is the kind of news that empties a family's Saturday plans.

You can see them now

Unlike a lot of zoo births, which come with a months-long wait before the public gets a look, these pups are already on view. The Game Farm is open daily from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., and its posts this week have been inviting visitors to come by and listen for the pups' chirps and purrs, the surprisingly vocal chatter capybaras use with each other.

The park has leaned all the way into its capybara moment this year. Its capybara encounter, where visitors meet, feed and photograph the animals at close range, now includes general admission to the whole park. There is a Long Island Capybara Club, an annual membership for the truly devoted at 35 dollars for an individual and 45 for a family. And families watching their budget can aim for a Thursday: the park's fall discount days, September 24, October 1 and October 8, bring admission down to 15 dollars for a child and accompanying adult, with a guided stroller safari for the 1-to-4 crowd at 11 a.m.

A family farm's sixth decade

The Game Farm at 489 Chapman Boulevard has been run by the Novak family since 1970, when it opened as a children's zoo and drive-through animal park in the Manorville woods. Generations of Long Islanders fed a deer there on a school trip, and the park has spent recent years rebuilding itself around exactly the kind of gentle, hands-on animal experiences the capybaras now headline.

Four pups with no names, a contest to name them, and a fall season with weekday discounts to go meet them: that is about as pure a piece of good news as a September gets. Entries go in on the Game Farm's announcement post, and the winners will be the ones explaining to a capybara, someday, why it is called Capycinno.