EnrichBits: A monthly look at animal enrichment Often our youth volunteers will help us do enrichment projects for the animals, and paper mache-ing balloons is a project I usually offer up to them, thinking it’s a good break from all the cleaning we ask of them. After the balloon dries we pop it and use the paper shell as a non toxic and ok-if-a-little-is-ingested toy that can hold hidden treats. This is use of both tactile and feeding/foraging enrichment.To myRead more
Posts filed in: Enrichment & Training
EnrichBits: Tactile Enrichment
EnrichBits: A monthly look at animal enrichment We’ve talked about Exhibit Design and Feeding and Foraging as two categories of a good animal enrichment program. Another important way we keep our animals challenged is by providing them with different textures and sensations. Big or small, warm or cool, soft or hard, bumpy or smooth, round or square– these are all different textures that we use for diets, toys, or exhibit “furniture”. By using different things like burlap bags, piles ofRead more
EnrichBits: Feeding and Foraging
EnrichBits: A monthly look at animal enrichment Food is a major component to our enrichment program here at the museum. Remember Enrichment and how important exhibit design is? Well, Feeding and Foraging is another big category of enrichment that we apply to our captive animals’ lives. There are quite a few ways in which we can vary, prepare, and distribute our animals’ daily diets in order to keep things interesting for them. They’d spend much of their waking time inRead more
Creature Feature: Red Wolf #1390
We currently have three Red Wolf brothers that are 2 years old, but arrived at the museum when they were only 7 months. We have spoken about our two other Red Wolves in previous posts, but Red Wolf #1390 is the one featured here. Red Wolf #1390 is the alpha of the three brothers (which means he is the highest-ranking wolf and is dominant over the others), probably due in part to him being the healthiest. He is not asRead more
EnrichBits: Exhibit Design
EnrichBits: A monthly look at animal enrichment. The first step in creating an enriching environment (don’t remember what enrichment is? Click here.) for a captive animal is thinking about how that species of animal spends its time in the wild. This summarization of an animal’s labors, actions, and general life is called an ACTIVITY BUDGET. A black bear’s activity budget would tell us how much time a bear spends sleeping, playing, looking for food, etc. From this activity budget youRead more
Young Volunteers Get Hands-On Experience
For some of our young volunteers, working with the Animal Department is a great way to get experience for the future. That’s because some of our kids come to us with great enthusiasm and love for animals and hope to one day be a Veterinarian or maybe even an Animal Keeper like us. One of our volunteers, Sarah (pictured above), enjoys weighing our smaller animals and reptiles to get experience in the field of veterinary care… and we are happyRead more