Emergency Training: Making Darts

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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Funny opossum photo

Katy has been going through her photos and came across this one of Galileo which made us both laugh. Annie was terrified when she found Galileo in the ball so the ball now looks like this But, since the opossum got out of the ball just fine, Katy and I think the ball should not be labeled “not for opossum use” but rather “not for Annie use”    Read more
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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
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Pet worms

We order Superworms to feed to our critters. That’s right, the are called “Superworms”.  They are big, and they are not really worms, but rather a larval stage of a beetle. A bill came in last week, and instead of saying “superworms” it said “PET” mealworms. Volunteer Annie specifically does not spend anytime with the superworms as she gets attached and has even named them. She’ll be amused to see that someone else thinks of them as “pets” too.Read more

Red Wolf update- 1227 is feisty and strong

I emailed my friend and Red Wolf Contact at the NC  Zoo to see how female red wolf 1227 was doing.  I drove her there on September 8th. (I was kept company on my drive by Volunteer Annie). Below is the email I received from Chris yesterday: She sure is feisty.  She went about 48 hours without eating but now she is eating well and appears to be gaining weight.  We did a quarantine exam on her and she wasRead more