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Junior keepers

I had a good time showing a group of six youth around the animal department last Sunday during our Junior Keeper program. This program is a chance for kids to come learn what it’s like to be a keeper. We had one junior keeper who returned after participating last year, and one who drove 4 hours all the way from the NC coast! They showed up at 9:00am, and we started off by raking the goat yard and brushing RockyRead more
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Yona’s First Day Meeting our Bears.

Sherry wrote about the bear introductions already but I wanted to add some video clips to her description. For a while Yona was in the side yard with Gus but they were not interacting. Yona was exploring the features in the yard and decided to tank a dunk in the water trough. Clip 1: Yona takes a plunge [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AoIE9gXxCs8[/youtube] Keeper Katy did some training with Gus. Here you can see and hear Katy doing “target” training. Gus gets a raisinRead more

EnrichBits: A game!

EnrichBits: A monthly (ahem)- ok, quarterly, look at animal enrichment. Sherry found this a long time ago, and it’s a really interesting way to think about enrichment. This is a game to help experiment with what goes into creating an enrichment program. Below is the scenario; what kind of enrichment plan would you come up with? Leave your suggestions in the comments section and try to remember all your categories of enrichment! The zoo recently acquired 1.0 Humans (Homo sapiens)Read more

Big Word of the Month: Evaporative Cooling

The big talk around the museum lately has been the weather for obvious reasons! Being cold got me thinking about the physics of heat loss, so for this month’s BWOM post I thought I would talk about evaporative cooling. When water changes from one state to another energy is either released or absorbed; as water moves from solid -> liquid ->gas energy input is required at each transition.You might think of evaporative cooling as an issue for the summer time.Read more
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The time is near!

I’ve been pretty excited recently over the growing anticipation of red wolf breeding season. I’ve been watching our female, #1227, closely for early signs of her being in estrous. So far nothing yet, but last year we saw the first signs in late January and early February when the male started to show more interest in her. She actually went into estrous last year on February 10th, so hopefully we are less than two weeks away! Our beautiful pair ofRead more