Happy 1.5 year anniversary to Kimberly being a keeper at the Museum! For regular blog readers, you’ve already got to know Kimberly quite well by reading her posts. She’s passionate about lemurs, animal training, and the natural world. She has a lot of cats at home. She works hard and loves being an animal keeper. Even through some rather difficult health issues in the recent past, she’s still pretty positive and cheery.
What you might not know about Kimberly is that she has her bachelors degree in biology from UNC Wilmington. She spent time at the Fort Worth Zoo in Texas and the Rio Grande Zoo in Albuquerque. She’s done an internship with arachnids so she doesn’t mind being around spiders. While in New Mexico, she spent most of her time doing animal programs and training hoof stock. She and a fellow keeper trained a hippo to open it’s mouth so its tooth could be trimmed (ask her to write about that please!).
We thankfully stole her away from the word of caring for children- some might say a much harder job than being an animal keeper. Getting rave reviews from the parent’s of the children she cared for was what sealed the deal to offer her a Keeper job.
She takes her job here very seriously- always thinking of the health and well being of the animals she works with and is not afraid to hold visitors in check for treating the critters poorly. I’m happy she’s been with us for one and half years and look forward to the next one and a half and many more.
While I still have a lot to learn about Kimberly, there’s one thing I want to know now: she told me she prefers to be called Kimberly, but others call her Kim. What do you think that is about?
I call her Kimberly too so maybe only people she thinks are cool can call her Kimberly?
Thanks Sherry for this spotlight. I do prefer being called Kimberly at work, it makes me feel more professional (no idea why) plus it’s much easier to hear over the radio than Kim. And as much as I’d like to take credit for the hippo training, that was all the work of the Senior Keeper, Catalina-she worked at the Rio Grande Zoo for 23 years when I was trained by her and was an amazing mentor!! I loved working in Hoofstock- super hard work but I didn’t train any hoofstock animals. Check out this post to see the animals I did train with- /keepers/2012/02/12/target-click/
thanks your for sharing
Kimberly is her name and I’m glad she likes what she was named her grandmother picked the name out
I do like my name Mom. Also Kim sounds too similiar to Kent, Ken, and Jim over the radio.