Spring is here and love is in the air. Our Royal Palm Turkey, Ozzie, knows it too. He’s been showing off mating behavior for the past week. Here’s a look at his show for the ladies– you can’t really hear, but he’s drumming (a quick thumping sound made in his chest) as he walks around like this. You can hear him occasionally do a quick “chh” sound, but most of the background noise is from the chickens who are nearby.Read more
Posts filed in: Videos
EnrichBits: Novel Item enrichment
EnrichBits: A monthly look at animal enrichment Do you ever feel the need to rearrange the furniture at home? Or maybe, you just have to get out of town for the weekend, to be in a different place. Perhaps you always grab a different type of cereal at the grocery store, so you aren’t eating the same thing every morning, or maybe you splurge for this spring’s latest fashion, just because…it’s new. Novelty is very much part of human lifeRead more
Animal Videos
We’ve posted a few videos of our animals over the months. Below are links to each post, just click on each one if you’d like to be able to quickly get to the videos. Bears eating. This is a time compressed video, as it states, showing our bears eating. Bear Hammock. This is a time compressed video showing our bears in their new hammock. Wolf enrichment. This shows red wolf #1390 interacting with some really great enrichment. Max running. ThisRead more
Happy Leap Year!
Celebrate February 29th with a visit to http://www.amphibianark.org/ and learn about why 2008 is the “Year of the Frog”. Amphibians are in a major crisis– up to 50% of the 6000 species of amphibians are threatened with extinction due to climate change, habitat loss, and a deadly fungal disease called chytridiomycosis. Use the extra 24 hours you have this year to learn about the conservation efforts taking place. Here’s some video from YouTube of Animal Planet’s Jeff Corwin on TheRead more
The rewards of stonedusting
One of the most physically demanding jobs we have as keepers is the maintenance of our farmyard animal yards. The substrate in their yards is called stonedust, and as the months pass the stonedust in the donkey, goat, steer, pig, and even poultry yards gets packed down, raked up, and washed away. So every so often we have to re-stonedust the yards, which is back-breaking work and involves carrying heavy shovelfuls from a pile of stonedust and distributing a 1-2Read 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