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.