Work in the cattle yard has just about finished. All that is left (hopefully) is tweaking. Posts were set for our chute in early July. Two weeks ago the concrete pad got poured. The Facilities Team, along with Exhibits’ and Landscape Staff have been working hard getting the work done. We’ve started to get Dusty and Dallas familiar with the area. Operant Conditioning will be used to train them to walk through the chute and stop at (in) the headRead more
Posts filed in: Farmyard
What’s New in the Cattle Yard.
Planning has been going on behind the scenes for a few months as we prepared to had a chute and head gate for the cattle. Keepers will train the bulls to walk into the chute. This will make working on such large animals safer for everyone… bulls and humans. Pictures below from phase one, post setting. Project should be completed in early August. Read more
Alpacas ready for summer
Come check out our newly sheared alpacas. They get sheared every April, and Thursday was a perfect day for everyone for our annual event. Jonathan, our Shearer, has been shearing alpacas and llamas for about 25 years. We’ve got first cuts of fleece for sale if you are interested in purchasing. The money raised is used to buy enrichment items for the farmyard.Read more
Farmyard Egg-citement!
Chicken eggs come in all sorts of colors aside from the typical brown or white you see in the grocery store. There are 6 bantam (miniature) hens in the farmyard who lay 6 different colored eggs! To help other keepers out, I took a photo of all the eggs together (above) and one of the three white eggs (below) Can you spot the differences? Here are our farmyard ladies, in the same order as the eggs in the first photoRead more
You Can Train a Goat?
One of the many things animal keepers are tasked with aside from the expected poop scooping and wall scrubbing is operant conditioning (aka “animal training”). Nearly all the animals at the museum have a primary trainer who thinks of new behaviors they’d like that animal to learn, then builds a step-by-step program to shape that behavior, and ultimately implements that program over the course of days to months (depending on the complexity and the animal’s response) until we’re at aRead more
Christmas 2017
So, I’m sweating at 5:30. Last night I set out shorts and sweat pants and a sweatshirt. I know I am always hot with the heat blowing while working indoors, so I set out layers to wear today. Yay for being prepared. Here’s the but… I decided not to wear them — what the heck was I thinking!! My alarm went off at 4:52 and I drug myself off the couch (with glasses on and not lost this year), brushedRead more