Do you ever wonder what we do on closed Mondays? (Today, we’re cleaning the bear pool). We do several Emergency Training Drills a year and a closed Monday is the perfect opportunity. I recently wrote about lemur tracking, we also do full on drills that include fake animal escapes and or damage due to storms or trees down, you might recall when Leslie played a bear. Today’s post is about making darts. We would potentially use a dart to sedate an escapedRead more
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Silly Times
The beginning of Spring brings all kinds of changes to the Animal Department. The bears are up and playing, the Ring-Tailed Lemurs get to stay outside in the yard, and the Wetlands explode with activity. One of our tasks for Spring includes removing the hay in the bear house. We put a good amount of hay on both sides of the bear house for the winter. It gets changed during supercleans and then removed completely once Spring arrives. There areRead more
Concurrent Accession
“Accession” is a word the zoological world uses to mean, “adding to.” It’s the term applied to newly acquired individuals to a museum/zoo/aquarium’s collection. We don’t have a large turnover in our collection at the museum. Every year we lose some animals due to old age, health problems, or transfers to other institutions and we gain a couple, but our collection stays at about the same number. Because we don’t take in new animals very often, I found it interestingRead more
Red Ruffed Lemur Training
I recently mentioned we’re now working on crate training the red ruffed lemurs. It’s been quite awhile since they have worked on this behavior. The last couple days have been very successful. All three lemurs have gone all the way into their crates. 🙂 This is just the beginning so check back soon for updates. Iris is going into the top crate at the same time that Jethys is going into the bottom crate.Read more
What’s been going on here
We’ve been staffed sparsely for the past week so people could have some time off for the Thanksgiving holiday. I hope everyone had a wonderful few days with family, friends, pets, or alone. With not many keepers around, there’s been little time to sit and update you on life here. With that said, here are a few photos to share about some of the things that have been going on here: I’ve been training Jessi to handle Phoebe, our education alligator.Read more
A Training Quiz!
In the tradition of Sherry’s quiz about her trip with Aaron, I’m posting a quiz about our training program here at the museum. Answers to follow in a few days! Which animal are we currently training to get voluntarily into a trailer, just in case they need to be transported to the vet? a) Auggie b) Lightning c) Gus d) Chummix Craisins are the favorite training treat for which animal? a) goats b) lemurs c) black bears d) donkey WhichRead more