If you’ve seen our lemurs up in Explore the Wild, you might have noticed that they have collars on their necks. Here’s a good picture of Lycus the Ring Tailed lemur where you can clearly see his collar:

Our Red Ruffed lemurs have them too, and both species wear them all the time. We put these collars on our lemurs for the same reason you put a collar on your dog: to help us get them back if they escape. But it’s not your usual dog collar with their name and our phone number. Instead, each collar has a little radio transmitter, and each one has a unique frequency that it puts out. It’s just like each collar is it’s own radio station, and we have a tracker that has an antennae that picks up the stations. So if Lycus were to escape, we would turn our tracker on the Lycus station (it doesn’t actually play music, but if it did, his would be mostly classical with swing and big band at night, and jazz on the weekends) and we would be able to hone in on his location.

We have an extra collar that we put on a stuffed lemur, and Sherry routinely hides the lemur somewhere on grounds and tells us to go find it. So the other Thursday after Larry and I were done cleaning up in Explore the Wild, we set off to find ourselves a stuffed lemur. *Sigh*, my job is sooooo boring.

We started near the lemur house. Larry had done lemur tracking many a time, and I had him school me on the finer points of it. I made a little video. It starts with Larry’s tutorial and jumps to me right behind the Butterfly House getting a strong signal from the parking lot. Then it jumps to me standing in the woods right beside the parking lot where the lemur was hidden. I wish the video were more thorough, but I kinda got enthralled with the whole thing (it was pretty thrilling to be riding around on the vehicle with a giant antennae hanging out of the side listening intently for a faint beep).