The Museum has four alligators. Three are on exhibit in Carolina Wildlife and one is kept off-exhibit for education programs. When the alligators get too big to handle for education (or for their exhibit), we take them back to Alligator Adventure in SC to exchange for younger (& smaller!) alligators. The ones we bring back are usually yearlings (but if we can get a hatchling, we try for that too!) Here’s a photo essay of our trip on Aug 31Read more
Posts filed in: Education
QuikPost: heading out…
I’m leaving (very early) tomorrow morning to fly to San Diego for this year’s AAZK (American Association of Zoo Keepers) conference. The San Diego Zoo is hosting it this year. The conference lasts 5 days, and 3 days of that is an intense agenda of presentations by zookeepers, curators, conservationists and other renowned individuals in the zoo keeping field from around the world, along with several workshops spanning virtually any topic you could wish to learn about as an animal keeper. I’llRead more
Black bears
Many times when I am in Explore the Wild I go the the Black Bear exhibit and will get an overall view of the exhibit. I do this mainly because I want to make sure I can get a clear view of all of the bears we have. We currently have 5. Below is a picture that I was able to snap that had 4 bears all in a line, Yona is the one that is missing. Sometimes, I overhearRead more
You had me at ‘Ology…
Okay guys, so you’ve all heard the big fancy words describing some aspect of science. Zoology is the study of animals and a big part of what we do here at the museum. Paleontology is the study of fossils and extinct animals that lived long ago and also plays a part in the goings on at the museum. There’s Geology (study of the Earth), Meteorology (study of the atmosphere), and dozens others. I can bore you just by listing them. Read more
Terms of venery
There are different definitions for this word, but in the form of this blog post, terms of venery are collective nouns that describe groups that animals are in. No, this is not a English lesson so you don’t have to worry about studying.For example, everyone is familiar with a pack of wolves or a herd of cows. Sometimes these words can change just by action of an animal. An example of this would be a group of geese are aRead more
Surprise! Baby Degus!!
Apparently our male degu, Luis, was not neutered fast enough… because on Monday, May 23rd, animal department volunteer Ashlyn found Florencia’s 6 baby degus in a bag of shredded paper (used for animal enrichment) when she was cleaning out the cages! Degus are born with fur and are cute as can be. The amazing thing to me is that Florencia is not really that much bigger than the sum of these 6 babies!Read more