Twas a lovely, cool morning last week and I was working in Explore the Wild tending to the bears. The bear enrichment that day was to put syrup in holey balls, and I thought it’d be fun to do it from the bear overlook and watch the bears interact with it. When I got up to the bear overlook, I wondered if I would run into Karyn, a member who I see around the museum quite a bit. I had just gotten out my phone to send her a tweet to come to the bear overlook if she was around, when she appeared like magic. It was quite fortuitous, as I, the keeper who is supposed to be carrying around a camera in her back pocket, neglected to have a camera in my back pocket. Luckily Karyn did!

Here’s a great video she took of the bears being very funny trying to get the holey balls out of the water and from each other. I kept marveling at how determined they were to fish the balls out of the pool, even after they had been bobbing around in there for a long while, and were most certainly syrupless. But I do not have the keen sense of smell as the bears do, so who am I to judge? Another thing to note is that I used Mrs. Buttersworth, which is the good stuff, so that probably had everything to do with their sudden motivation.

Here’s a list of all of our posts on enrichment if this amuses you. Another lesson that you can get from this is: talk to us! We like seeing our members around the museum and letting them know if something cool is happening. Thanks for the video, Karyn!

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xvJ-vgSlRFQ[/youtube]