It’s Watermelon Day 2015!! Are you coming to visit today to watch our animals get silly over watermelons?! You should! There will be short programs happening all day long in the Farmyard, Bears, Lemurs, and in Carolina Wildlife. You can even leave a watermelon at the front desk for the critters to eat later in the day! Check out some of our past years below, or do a search in the orange bar below the blog for all ofRead more
Wobble Wobble
The bears have a new structure in their yard! It looks a bit like one of the Observatory Towers in Queens, New York, only smaller. Keeper Autumn, and our amazing exhibits staff, built a “wobble tree” for the bears! It’s a food dispensing tower that’s nearly 14 feet tall. We load food onto the platform on the top, then the bears need to push or pull the tower to make the food fall out. Here’s a video of Mimi knockingRead more
QuikPics: Dashboard Cookies
Most everyone has heard the adage, “it’s so hot you can fry an egg on the sidewalk!” or some variation of it. I wondered, similarly, if it would be possible to bake cookies on the dashboard of my car on a 100+ degree day. This is a science museum, after all! Words of caution: I cannot speak to the safety of eating cookies that baked in a car for nearly 10 hours. There are eggs and other ingredients in cookieRead more
Mimi Takes a Shower
Welcome to summer in the South. It’s hot. Mimi, one of our female black bears, has taken to coming to visit whomever is cleaning the bear house in the morning to get sprayed down with the hose. She’s been especially cute as the temperatures have gotten hotter. Last Sunday, I managed to coordinate my cellphone and the hose well enough to get some of her morning shower on video! Watch below!Read more
Yona Finds a Toy
It doesn’t seem to matter some days how creative we keepers are with our enrichment ideas. This day, the “best toy ever” was a stick. Enjoy the pics I snapped from the bear house of Yona keeping herself amused while Autumn and I giggled at her antics.Read more
QuickPic: Tossing Out the Trash
On the interns’ last afternoon with Autumn and I, we used the extra sets of hands to do a big Spring cleaning of the bear compound. Jana decided she wanted to recycle some of the old enrichment we were tossing for her own pets. Mae offered to help her…and then hold her still for a photo op!Read more