Thank you Marilyn!

We got a truck load (literally) of food delivered a few days ago. 63 boxes of food and Marilyn broke down EVERY SINGLE BOX. Huge thanks goes out to Marilyn for stepping out of her day job and helping out (again) in the animal department.Read more

QuikPost: Department Update

We’re probably going to be posting a little less for a while. As you know, Kimberly has moved on to work with Homo sapiens. Separately, Marilyn is out recovering from surgery and will not be back until sometime in December. So, the remaining staff here will be hustling and bustling to deal with all that needs to get dealt with. We’ll still be blogging and sharing what is going on it just won’t be as frequent. Wolf Physicals are onRead more

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

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
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Pumpkin enrichment

In the fall we receive A LOT of donated pumpkins that are used in the animal department. Some animals eat them, some animals play with them, and some animals don’t really do anything with them. Our muskrats really like to eat pumpkin, so we give it to them sometimes as enrichment or as a substitute for another vegetable in their daily diet. In an effort to use some of the many pumpkins that we had, I decided to do both.Read more