Week 39: Santa Barbara Rocks!

I went to my first zoo day on Tuesday at Santa Barbara zoo. It was amazing! I worked the bird string, but my cool experiences were not limited to avian types. My morning started out by getting oriented with the keepers and the zoo. We started by opening up some tortoise exhibits, and then we went to the giraffe exhibit (there are cranes, horn bills, and tortoises in there). I got to meet a giraffe face to face and I fed him some biscuits! I also saw the back end of the gorilla exhibit with their juvenile males. We cleaned and fed the animals there, then I moved on to another keeper and I was working more with birds of prey. They have an awesome tawny frogmouth (look it up!), named Stanley! I love these birds, and she let me perch him out and I put him back home later in the day. I did some un-exciting hosing here and general chores. I got to see their new California condor exhibit, that was neat to see four of approximately 300 existing birds. I then got to help out with their morning and afternoon penuin feeding. We even played with one in the back-end of the exhibit who was hand-raised and people friendly! I also got to feed the brown pelicans! In the afternoon, we candled a penguin egg (it's that time of year!) to see if it was fertile; it didn't look good, yet they were unconvinced. I got to help out with the Asian small-clawed otter feeding in a bit of free time I had (they're so cute!!). At the end of the day, it was a lot of quick feedings and pulling food. There were a lot of macaw pairs to be put back into their over-night holdings. We did that by perching them on the end of a long stick and then carrying them back with the stick held up like a flag pole! The really cool part of all of this is that when I was asked if I knew how to handle or do something, I did and they trusted me. These zoo days are going to really show us how much we've learned so far.
That was the true highlight of my week. Otherwise, finals started and are going well so far! Still having massive co-trainer issues, but hopefully people will learn to grow up and take some responsibility soon, or get kicked out. Either way... Pictures: ([reptile presentation a few weeks ago] Hila monster, gaboon viper, me and Kissu, CJ [AKA Calamity Jane]: coyote)