Week 6, Audio/Visual feast!

OK, well, I guess there's not much audio, but you'll love it! This week had a few pretty cool moments in it. We became back-up certified, so now we can go and assist second years when they take animals out. That definitely adds some good reason to stick around the zoo for longer now that we can do that. I'm doing pretty good grades-wise in my classes and the outlook is good that I'll end up with most of my first choice animals when we get to assignments. While we are now back-up certified, we can't back-up all animals yet. We have to put in more time to do carnivores and birds of prey. To complete our requirements for birds of prey, we have to have two hours of "manning" time. Manning is just what you call being out with a bird of prey. So, here's some pics of my session I had Tuesday with Alba, one of our barn owls. We went for a little stroll around the zoo. Don't worry, I was under the heavy supervision of a second year the whole time. My assigned area this week was nutrition. That's where we make all the animal's diets. Most diets are made by the trainers, but we still get to make quite a few. I'm sure you're asking yourself, "But what do they feed them?"; I'll be happy to answer that! We use all kinds of fresh produce for a lot of our animals, they seem to be particularly fond of yams. There is also a wide variety of pelleted diets we purchase from a company that makes food for zoo animals; so we have monkey chow, crocodile pellets, pig pellets, bird pellets, as well as some ordinary cat and dog kibbles. We also keep some crickets and meal worms around for insectivores. For the carnivores, they tend to want meat, so this we must oblige. We get large 5 lb. "logs" of ground meat that is a completely nutritious diet for them. I think it's mostly composed of horse meat. Interestingly enough, it's not just meat in it, it's got some good chunks of organs and tasty bits of that. I imagine when they make it it's something like putting a whole skinned horse into a wood chipper. (How's that for an overly graphic image?) On a lighter, definitely cuter, note: I took our leopard tortoise out on a walk for a bit this week, and trust me, he's a walking fool. Little Joe is seriously planning his escape, but first, he enjoyed some tasty grass, and here's a video of him doing that.

Week 5, What a Show...

Nothing much happened the first bit of the week, just general boring-ness with classes and all. Once area started for me on Wednesday, it got interesting. I was assigned to show/wildlife theatre area. Show is just an area of the zoo and I guess it was called that for lack of any other names. Actually, very few of the animals housed in there do shows, but whatever. This is a big area with lots and lots of work to do. There were four of us first years in there and we pretty much divided out into two people who could work quickly and effectively and two people who managed to take an hour to rake out a pig's enclosure. However, because of their slowness, I got to do a lot of cool things with animals! I held the chinchilla a few times while we cleaned out his cage, but the coolest thing by far is what I did Saturday. We have to clean out Hudson's (our beaver) pool everyday. Since on the weekends, we do this cleaning a bit later than normal, he's awake and hanging out. We have to keep him from falling into the empty pool and keep him from getting into the tools and chemicals we bring in there with us. So, while my partner scrubbed and cleaned the pool, I played beaver wrangler for a while. That was fun! Beavers are very strong and fairly heavy, so this wasn't really an easy task, but totally a cool one. I also had several close encounters with our blue crane who gets very excited around people and likes to be all in your business. This has been a pretty cool week overall; I wasn't initially too excited about show since I knew how much work it was, but now that I've done it, I really like it! Definately looking forward to doing this area again.

Week 4!

I really wish something cool would happen so I could get some better titles for these things. I guess the big to-do of the week was the diversity test, and it wasn't that hard. There were several people I think were ready to pull out their hair, but afterwards they discovered that it wasn't as hard as everyone made it out to be. My area assignment this week was for parrots (my least favorite animals at the zoo). It was alright in that it wasn't hard and we really didn't get dirty. It was incredibly nerve racking for me though to be in and out of those cages with the birds as I'm not too fond of them and I'm not sure what they will look like when they try to eat me. But, I survived and the parrots did too, so it worked out. I only got trapped once, and it was no big deal. Currently, I'm busy pulling together my assignment for another class where we make detailed maps of the zoo. Can you say busy work?
The only other thing happening right now is all the people who want to work with Shmoo II (our one-and-only sea lion) are scrambling around to all these mandatory sessions to learn how much crazy hard work it is to be with sea lions. I'd have to say it's about 97% of the class that wants to be either a trainer or caretaker, and I'm one of those very few who really doesn't care. Shmoo is very cool and entertaining, but I'll let the people who actually have hopes, dreams, and a shot at working with marine mammals professionally go nuts over her. I personally don't think marine mammals will ever work out for me since I'm not too fond of the water and swimming, so I'll just appreciate them from afar and still get cool insider access from my buddies that do do the training.

Week 3: The Real Work Begins

This was our first week of area! My roommate and I were happy to find we'd been assigned to the same area this week, primates. However, the third in our party was somewhat unfortunate. A socially awkward (really, you could say inept), constantly-questioning fool was constantly grating on our nerves and we did just about everything we could to take jobs that either didn't involve him at all, or physically moved us away from him. You see, with the monkeys, there is a proper etiquette to follow so they don't eventually perceive you as submissive and weak. This is very important to keep up as we have no idea which, if any, of these animals we'll be working with yet. He mostly made it a point (I'm sure subconsciously) to break every one of these rules, and I sincerely hope I'm there for the day one of the monkeys reaches through the bars and grabs him in a bad way. Our second years continue to be really nice, but it's become somewhat of a problem in that they are so nice, they're not doing a very great job of getting through to this guy and correcting his behavior (ironic, since this is what they do with animals...).
Our classes are starting to pick up a little bit, but still not much happening there. Getting closer to a few tests now, and having some projects with nearer due dates, but nothing serious to worry about yet. It was a pretty uneventful week overall, I'm sure after this week's assignment in parrots, I'll have at least one interesting story.