Week One was Lots of Fun!

Week one at the zoo turned out to be a very eye-opening experience.

Number 1: I have SO much more respect for what keepers do to care for animals every single day. It takes a lot of hard work, motivation, and elbow grease to be constantly bending, lifting, carrying, and sweeping during the heat of the day. Needless to say, I'm pretty sore. It can also be pretty dangerous. I've had to hang back a couple of times while the keepers go in to put the oryx out on exhibit because they're capable of killing lions with their huge horns and they have babies, which tends to complicate the situation even more. Even though the keepers use safe practices to keep humans and animals alike out of danger, they put themselves in tricky situations in order for the public to learn about and come to love these wild animals and better understand why conservation is so important. Zoo keeping also takes patience and teamwork. The eland took over an hour to walk the three mile corridor to go on exhibit one morning last week. Even alfalfa treats weren't enough to coax them from the barn to the savannah. Out of the 11 keepers on my team, 4 of them had to come down to help out. So, the next time you visit a zoo, remember the people who make it all possible. The things I wish I would have know when I was younger...

Number 2: I got to tour the vet clinic and it's pretty much the most awesome facility with the most high-tech stuff ever. Ok, maybe it's not as crazy as the fake labs on the crime shows of TV, but Kirk showed us how he can take radiographs of a spine and then rotate the image to zoom down through the spine in the area the spinal cord should be to diagnose oddities like the fusion of disks and predict whether paralysis will happen or not. And, being the dork I am, I think that's amazing. They have one of the best digital sonogram machines, too. He explained how darting works (that's how they administer antibiotics and other medications--I've seen him do it on a kudu) and how dangerous some of the drugs they use to anesthetize are. He also gave us popsicles again!

Number 3: I've learned that there's never a dull day at the zoo. On Friday, I cleaned giraffe stalls, helped put the eland, oryx, kudu, and zebra out on exhibit, bottle-fed the baby kudu, went to an orientation meeting, and got a tour of commissary and the tropics area. Saturday, I cleaned giraffe stalls, helped put the eland out on exhibit, and got to tour the vet clinic. Sunday, I worked with the rhinos, went to the sea lion show and got to watch the trainers work with the animals, and fed the rhino during the rhino keeper chat. Yesterday, I worked in rhino again and took great joy in feeding them some browse--fresh tree branches covered in leafy greens. They like it a lot! We also found a copperhead outside one of the sheds perfectly camouflaged in some leaves.

It's going well so far!

God bless,

Liz

Zoo-rific Fact of the Day: Rhinos have 24-34 teeth, depending on the species and swans can break human legs with a bat of their powerful wings.