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.