A Zoo Man's Notebook, 2025

[snowleopard]

I love Binturongs! I've seen this species at 64 zoos, but that total was boosted enormously by last summer's Southeast Asia trip when I visited 26 zoos with Binturongs in 3 weeks. At some of those Asian zoos, I would see 3, 4 or even 5 different exhibits with Binturongs as they are more common than Meerkats in that part of the world.

Batu Secret Zoo (Indonesia) currently has more than 20 Binturongs, and of the tremendous number of Binturongs that I've seen, ONE stands out because of its odd colour morph pattern. The individual in the photo is at Batu Secret Zoo and the animal was obtained from a private breeder.

 

[Aardwolf]

@pachyderm pro , I think I'm going to have to do an entire separate post on the subject of ambassadors at some point - it's such a complex question. In short, I think there's a right way to do it and a wrong way to do it, the right way resulting in good educational messaging with behaviorally competent animals, and the wrong way resulting in stressed, neurotic little beasts that are treated more like props than animals. I've seen plenty of examples of both.

Speaking of stressed, neurotic little beasts...

I’ve worked with two capuchins over the course of my career. For all of their popularity in private zoos and the pet trade, they've really struggled with sustainability in AZA facilities. Neither of the two I worked with were part of any managed breeding program. Both of them were singletons, and both were regrettable case studies in why primates don’t make good pets. First, let me take you to a non-AZA, where we’ll meet a boy named Sue.

Sue was, by far, the biggest racist I have ever worked with. The mere sight of a visitor of African descent would leave him (yes, "him") violently shaking with rage. He also wasn't a big fan of women... and he hated - absolutely HATED - people in wheelchairs. And oh my goodness, the one day that we had a black woman in a wheelchair come by to see him, you would have thought it was the end of the world.

Yeah, Sue had issues, and as a former pet, his upbringing hadn't been the best. He'd certainly seen a lot of misfortune by the time he found his way under my care... but to the best of my knowledge, none of it at the hands of black women in wheelchairs.

Sue had been an illegal pet, private ownership of primates being banned in my state, but legal a few states over, where he was purchased as a present for a significant other. I don't know how well the gift was received when first given, but apparently the novelty wore off fairly soon. They didn't even keep their little bundle of joy long enough to bother looking between his legs. If they had, maybe they would have settled on a different name.

Sue was my first experience with a former pet primate, and unfortunately not the last. Capuchins are especially popular in this regard. They are handsome little guys, the size of cats, and like cats they look like they'd be perfect for snuggling up with. They are not. Expecting a monkey to stay small, cute, and lovable is like expecting a human child to stay as a baby or toddler instead of becoming a moody, angst-ridden teenager. Like teenagers, the capuchin will have sex hormones kicking in at some point. Unlike the teenager, the capuchin is equipped with a not-so-nice set of sharp canine teeth.

By the time Sue reached us, he had basically figured out that he wasn't a person, but couldn't come to terms with the fact that he was a monkey. Instead, he remained a frustrated little half-man (I've seen something similar with many parrots over the years, which, to be fair, are basically feathery monkeys). He could expect to live decades longer, and I wasn't sure how happy he'd be for any of those years. He was happy enough getting affection from those of us who fit his arbitrary standards, especially if we smuggled him his favorite treat (coffee creamer, which he would eagerly drink from a cup). Still, so many things upset him, we couldn't be with him all the time, and he never showed much promise at getting along with other monkeys.

Sue escaped one day, though thankfully only briefly. A volunteer was transporting him from his indoor holding to his outdoor play pen when he slipped his leash and sprinted off. I heard the call over the radio and ran to the scene, more worried that he would find an African-American or handicapped visitor and attack them than I was of his going too far. As it was, we cornered him ten minutes later. One glimpse of a coffee creamer in my palm and he was on my shoulder in a flash, cheerfully oblivious to the fuss he had caused.

Stories like this make it sound like working with Sue was fun and cute and quirky. It wasn't. It was very stressful - he went from sweet and snuggly to angry ragaholic in the blink of an eye. Keeping him out of trouble took a lot of effort and time. He had constant health problems and behavioral problems. His hygiene was appalling. No matter how much time I spent working with him, it felt like it was never enough. I looked at the other monkeys in the zoo, all living together and far less labor-intensive and (at least seemingly) far happier. Sometimes I just wanted to scream at Sue "WHY CAN'T YOU BE NORMAL!"

Then I remembered why.



My second capuchin encounter came at an AZA zoo, where again an illegal-kept capuchin came to us. This little one was brought to us by local law enforcement after his owners (who, again, bought him in a state where primates were legal) took the monkey to Walmart with them. In this situation, we were only holding the capuchin for the duration of the court case, which grew protracted as the owners contested the confiscation. During the trial, the monkey was kept in our hospital, and I don’t think I ever saw a sadder sight. The little thing was terrified – whenever I’d walk in, I’d find him sitting in a pile of blankets, rocking nervously.

We fed a diet similar to what we fed our spider monkeys – primate chow (canned and pelleted), produce, some eggs and nuts, as well as some inverts – and offered what enrichment we could, but no one really felt great about the welfare situation of this animal. It was a considerable relief to us after the case when we were able to transfer this guy to a sanctuary in a different state that specialized in the social rehabilitation of former-pet primates.

These two capuchins taught me one thing about primates - they do not make good pets. I mean, I'd heard that and been told that before, but they really taught me that. Whenever I hear a visitor say, "Oh, look at the monkeys - I want one!" you can bet I'll pop out of the woodwork immediately.

"Let me tell you about my friend Sue..."

 

[Great Argus]

These two capuchins taught me one thing about primates - they do not make good pets. I mean, I'd heard that and been told that before, but they really taught me that. Whenever I hear a visitor say, "Oh, look at the monkeys - I want one!" you can bet I'll pop out of the woodwork immediately.

I really do not understand the demand for primates as pets. There are so many fairly obvious reasons that should imply they're a poor choice, such as their capability to get into virtually anything anywhere. Yet the cute factor seems to override any sort of common sense and there is still significant demand. I've seen so many stories of confiscated spider monkeys in the last year or so with many people clearly having no idea of how to appropriately attempt caring for them... it's really sad. I certainly would not be opposed to more extensive legislation banning private ownership of primates.

 

[Jurek7]

Monkeys are deadly pets. One long time worker of a rescue said plainly: every single time he knows when a monkey was a house pet, had teeth not removed and survived to adulthood, the monkey seriously injured at least one human, usually its owner.

 

[Aardwolf]

I actually was not that into birds growing up, with the exception of a few species which really captured my interest, like cassowaries (I positively shudder these days to think of how many extremely cool birds I saw at zoos when I was younger, now gone from American zoos, that I largely ignored because I wasn’t focused on them). If I had to pick a moment when my interest started to turn, it was when I was in college. Coursework tailored specifically to aspiring zoo professionals was somewhat limited, but my college DID offer one class that stood out to me – Exotic Avian Husbandry and Propagation (or something like that… it was forever ago). Despite the title, the class really only focused on two groups of birds – parrots, and raptors.

It turns out, the college had a hidden gem that I was unaware of. Tucked away in a corner of campus was a specialized raptor facility, closed to the public. The birds there were divided into three collections. There were the rehab cases, being prepped for release back into the wild. There were the non-releasable birds, used for education programs. And then there were the breeding birds. The professor who taught the class and ran the facility was captive-breeding North American accipiters for release into the wild.

The facility housed the three North American accipiters – the sharp-shinned hawk, the Cooper’s hawk, and, in the greatest number (and the primary focus of our professor), the northern goshawk.

The goshawks were kept in a brand new barn that our professor designed, located a few hundred yards off from the main hawk barn where volunteers kept the education raptors – this was to give them extra space and privacy. The goshawk barn was a long hallway with pens on either side, solid walled on the sides and the back (hallway portion) to minimize visual contact with people or other pairs of hawks, meshed on the front to allow in fresh air and light. The pens were all fairly simple – about 30’ square, maybe 15’ tall, with gravel substrate and a variety of perches and ledges. We’d go in, hose out the gravel to wash the poop away, collect any uneaten food, place their diet, refill the water, and leave. Quickly.

Care for the goshawks was limited to the most senior volunteers, which I soon became. This was for the safety of the birds – and for the volunteers. The bird banding code for Accipiter gentilis is NOGO – or “No Go,” which we all thought was pretty apt advice for entering their pens. They were some of the most foul-tempered birds I have ever worked with, and you had to move quickly and quietly doing your work, otherwise you’d be guaranteed to get dive-bombed. Periodically, we’d have to catch them up for physicals, usually one person netting, the other grabbing. I’ve gotten to be very good at netting birds – a big part of it comes down to having the net not where the bird is (because it will soon not be there), but where it is about to be. Once netted, the other person, wearing welding gloves, would grab the bird, one hand holding the wings against the body, the other securing the feet, with the bird on its back like a baby. Unlike a baby, the goshawk will, during all of this, be fixing you with a look of such unimaginable hatred that you feel like you’re about to burst into flames from its intensity.

The accipiters were primarily fed quail (which were raised in large numbers elsewhere on the campus for research and teaching purposes), as well as some chicken, rat, and rabbit. By nature of the release program, we kept very limited contact with them, which seemed to work in keeping them wild. There was fairly little breeding going on while I was there, which we attributed to all of the birds being caught up my first year there for relocation to their new barn. Things starting picking up towards the end of my time there three years later, though I didn’t get to assist in any of the actual releases – none of us did. Our professor always handled that himself, presumably for the safety and security of the release site.

Of the three accipeters, my favorites were the sharpies – though they were in some ways equally challenging. Not that they ever tried to attack us – instead, they escaped so readily. In order to reduce disturbance of the sharp-shinned hawks (and to reduce their association of us with food), we often fed them through a hole cut in the side of their aviary, covered with a baffle, from the central hallway. On several occasions, however, a volunteer would slide open the baffle, only to have a hawk zoom through the hole. Now, sharpies are small birds, for hawks – blue jay size – but to watch one time its flight perfectly and zip through a hole about the size of an apple in diameter was always startling. Thankfully, they were always fed from the secondary hallway, so there was confinement, but I’d often be at the end of the hall, where the kitchen was, carving up chickens, making jesses, or putting away gear, when I’d hear a volunteer scream from down the hall, “Nobody open a door, nobody open a door!”



It's been many years since I left college, and I realize, to my amazement, that I’ve never seen a captive goshawk or sharp-shin since those days. Ironically, the one species that I’ve seen in a handful of zoos is the one that our professor taught us was the most difficult accipiter to keep – Cooper’s hawk. Cooper’s hawks, he told us, are very easily stressed and prone to go into shock when handled for more than a moment, literally dying in their caregiver’s arms (you know… like the Cutting Crew song). As a result, I was a nervous wreck whenever looking at one. But, as I mentioned very early on in this thread, there’s a lot of variation among individuals of a species. My college girlfriend, it just so happened, was also a senior volunteer at this center, and when a non-releasable Cooper’s hawk was brought to us, she decided to train it as an education bird – with remarkable success. The bird was still fairly young, recently independent but still in juvenile plumage, which I imagine helped a lot.

I suspect that part of the reason that you see Cooper’s more than sharpies in zoos is that, with their larger size, Cooper’s are more likely to survive an injury that would leave them non-releasable in the wild, whereas a sharp-shin, being smaller and more delicate, would just die. Goshawks, as with many northern bird species, are very prone to aspergillosis, which, combined with their easily-stressed nature, would make them difficult birds to exhibit – which is a pity, because they are one of the most beautiful of all North American raptors.

They may not have the most charming personalities, but the three accipiters did serve as my gateway to birds, which gradually expanded to a deep interest in all species… even the parrots.

 

[Strathmorezoo]

I actually was not that into birds growing up, with the exception of a few species which really captured my interest, like cassowaries (I positively shudder these days to think of how many extremely cool birds I saw at zoos when I was younger, now gone from American zoos, that I largely ignored because I wasn’t focused on them). If I had to pick a moment when my interest started to turn, it was when I was in college. Coursework tailored specifically to aspiring zoo professionals was somewhat limited, but my college DID offer one class that stood out to me – Exotic Avian Husbandry and Propagation (or something like that… it was forever ago). Despite the title, the class really only focused on two groups of birds – parrots, and raptors.

It turns out, the college had a hidden gem that I was unaware of. Tucked away in a corner of campus was a specialized raptor facility, closed to the public. The birds there were divided into three collections. There were the rehab cases, being prepped for release back into the wild. There were the non-releasable birds, used for education programs. And then there were the breeding birds. The professor who taught the class and ran the facility was captive-breeding North American accipiters for release into the wild.

The facility housed the three North American accipiters – the sharp-shinned hawk, the Cooper’s hawk, and, in the greatest number (and the primary focus of our professor), the northern goshawk.

The goshawks were kept in a brand new barn that our professor designed, located a few hundred yards off from the main hawk barn where volunteers kept the education raptors – this was to give them extra space and privacy. The goshawk barn was a long hallway with pens on either side, solid walled on the sides and the back (hallway portion) to minimize visual contact with people or other pairs of hawks, meshed on the front to allow in fresh air and light. The pens were all fairly simple – about 30’ square, maybe 15’ tall, with gravel substrate and a variety of perches and ledges. We’d go in, hose out the gravel to wash the poop away, collect any uneaten food, place their diet, refill the water, and leave. Quickly.

Care for the goshawks was limited to the most senior volunteers, which I soon became. This was for the safety of the birds – and for the volunteers. The bird banding code for Accipiter gentilis is NOGO – or “No Go,” which we all thought was pretty apt advice for entering their pens. They were some of the most foul-tempered birds I have ever worked with, and you had to move quickly and quietly doing your work, otherwise you’d be guaranteed to get dive-bombed. Periodically, we’d have to catch them up for physicals, usually one person netting, the other grabbing. I’ve gotten to be very good at netting birds – a big part of it comes down to having the net not where the bird is (because it will soon not be there), but where it is about to be. Once netted, the other person, wearing welding gloves, would grab the bird, one hand holding the wings against the body, the other securing the feet, with the bird on its back like a baby. Unlike a baby, the goshawk will, during all of this, be fixing you with a look of such unimaginable hatred that you feel like you’re about to burst into flames from its intensity.

The accipiters were primarily fed quail (which were raised in large numbers elsewhere on the campus for research and teaching purposes), as well as some chicken, rat, and rabbit. By nature of the release program, we kept very limited contact with them, which seemed to work in keeping them wild. There was fairly little breeding going on while I was there, which we attributed to all of the birds being caught up my first year there for relocation to their new barn. Things starting picking up towards the end of my time there three years later, though I didn’t get to assist in any of the actual releases – none of us did. Our professor always handled that himself, presumably for the safety and security of the release site.

Of the three accipeters, my favorites were the sharpies – though they were in some ways equally challenging. Not that they ever tried to attack us – instead, they escaped so readily. In order to reduce disturbance of the sharp-shinned hawks (and to reduce their association of us with food), we often fed them through a hole cut in the side of their aviary, covered with a baffle, from the central hallway. On several occasions, however, a volunteer would slide open the baffle, only to have a hawk zoom through the hole. Now, sharpies are small birds, for hawks – blue jay size – but to watch one time its flight perfectly and zip through a hole about the size of an apple in diameter was always startling. Thankfully, they were always fed from the secondary hallway, so there was confinement, but I’d often be at the end of the hall, where the kitchen was, carving up chickens, making jesses, or putting away gear, when I’d hear a volunteer scream from down the hall, “Nobody open a door, nobody open a door!”

View attachment 782643

It's been many years since I left college, and I realize, to my amazement, that I’ve never seen a captive goshawk or sharp-shin since those days. Ironically, the one species that I’ve seen in a handful of zoos is the one that our professor taught us was the most difficult accipiter to keep – Cooper’s hawk. Cooper’s hawks, he told us, are very easily stressed and prone to go into shock when handled for more than a moment, literally dying in their caregiver’s arms (you know… like the Cutting Crew song). As a result, I was a nervous wreck whenever looking at one. But, as I mentioned very early on in this thread, there’s a lot of variation among individuals of a species. My college girlfriend, it just so happened, was also a senior volunteer at this center, and when a non-releasable Cooper’s hawk was brought to us, she decided to train it as an education bird – with remarkable success. The bird was still fairly young, recently independent but still in juvenile plumage, which I imagine helped a lot.

I suspect that part of the reason that you see Cooper’s more than sharpies in zoos is that, with their larger size, Cooper’s are more likely to survive an injury that would leave them non-releasable in the wild, whereas a sharp-shin, being smaller and more delicate, would just die. Goshawks, as with many northern bird species, are very prone to aspergillosis, which, combined with their easily-stressed nature, would make them difficult birds to exhibit – which is a pity, because they are one of the most beautiful of all North American raptors.

They may not have the most charming personalities, but the three accipiters did serve as my gateway to birds, which gradually expanded to a deep interest in all species… even the parrots.

I remember an avian vet telling me that the worst thing that you can do to a bird, particularly a highly strung species, is to catch it. He explained that the bacteria in a stressful birds lungs will multiply very quickly, which can cause hyperventilating and possibly aspergillosis. Your explanation of catching those birds quickly and efficiently by anticipating the flight of the birds was correct and I find that such a manoeuvre is something that is not easily taught but comes with experience.

 

[Aardwolf]

@Strathmorezoo, that hits on one of the most challenging aspects of zookeeping. On one hand, keepers need to be trained to get the confidence, experience, and skill in order to safely do potentially risky (for human or animal) tasks, such as manually restraining animals. On the other hand, such teaching opportunities don’t always come along often, and, since they can be dangerous or stressful, there’s always the desire to just have the most experience folks do the job to get it over with quickly and safely. But then those people eventually leave the facility, and then you have a knowledge gap, unless you’ve trained people to take over those tasks… which you can only do if they’ve been given hands-on experience.

A controversial historical theory – when early humans first began hunting the wild turkey, they did not do so for food. They did so for self-defense. The males of this species are among the most pugnacious of species I’ve ever encountered. Sure, I may have told some stories about having to fend of male rheas, or greater curassows, but there were days when those birds left me alone. Never in my six years working with wild turkeys did I ever approach that exhibit without the male waiting for me at the gate, ready for a throw down.



While I’d worked with domestic turkeys at a few non-AZA zoos (including one where they were later banished after the male was attacking children in the petting area), my experience with wild turkeys is limited to one AZA zoo. The turkeys – a flock of one male (perhaps inevitably named "Tom"), three females, all flight-restricted – shared a large, wooded paddock with a herd of white-tailed deer. The exhibit had several large trees (smaller shrubs would have been eaten by the deer), mostly pine, but a few oaks, dropping acorns, and was carpeted with a deep layer of pine needles and fallen leaves, which provided opportunities for foraging for insects and other invertebrates. There was a pool at one end of the exhibit, which provided drinking water, as well as a large area of earth which we kept raked down to the dirt for dust bathing. A ladder-like series of perches had been constructed to provide safe sleeping spaces off the ground. At the back of the yard was an open-fronted shed for shelter, not that I ever saw the turkeys use it.

The birds were fed Mazuri gamebird pellets, which I’d carry to the yard in a bucket or scoop every morning, and then fling in a wide arc as I left the exhibit. This reduced the likelihood of the deer scarfing it all up (the deer were fed their diet in pans). Sometimes I’d also toss some mealworms or frozen crickets, though it did seem like the turkeys spent a fair amount of their time foraging for natural food.

The male, as I’ve said, was an absolute nuisance. Thankfully, his aggression was so single-minded that it made him very easy to catch up in the mornings. I’d stand behind a little catch pen, using a cable to pull up the guillotine door that led to the yard – to get close to me, he’d rush into the pen, and then I’d lower the door behind him, which allowed me to clean the exhibit. If I did not do this – and there were days that I tried – it would easily take three times as long to service the exhibit, since I’d constantly be turning around to push him back with the rake and shovel. It was much more efficient overall to just have him locked up so I could clean. Despite his aggression to keepers, he never showed any inclination to harass or fight with the deer that he shared a yard with, or any of the native wildlife that entered the pen.

When you’re a keeper, one of the most stressful jobs of every day is doing your morning check ins, going from exhibit to exhibit to do a head count and make sure all animals are present, alive, and well. It can be its most stressful when you are missing an animal, even if it’s one that you know is an excellent hider, and you can eat up a lot of your mornings somedays trying to find the elusive ones. The opposite is also true, in that sometimes you come in and find an animal that you weren’t expecting. And I don’t always mean a baby.

One day, we were doing morning checks when we discovered that we did not have four adult wild turkeys on exhibit – we had five. An actual wild female had decided to join our flock. For the next few weeks she came and went as she pleased (alarming visitors when she would fly in and out of the exhibit, which led them to suspect that the other turkeys were really wild as well). Then, one day, after being absent for quite some time, she came back – with chicks. She appeared to have mated with our captive male, went off and laid eggs somewhere, and then brought her brood over for a visit. Some of the chicks were, inevitably, lost to predators, but enough stuck around to make a pretty cool experience for visitors… and for us.

As a turkey keeper, you will inevitably get very, very tired of visitors making jokes about Thanksgiving dinner or otherwise eating your turkeys. And no, I did not especially like our male turkey but c'mon - do I make jokes about eating your kids? I suppose it always annoyed me a little more because, deep down, I knew that if any of these tough guys found themselves in Tom's enclosure without a gun or a bow, he'd mop the floor with them in thirty seconds flat.

 

[Strathmorezoo]

@Strathmorezoo, that hits on one of the most challenging aspects of zookeeping. On one hand, keepers need to be trained to get the confidence, experience, and skill in order to safely do potentially risky (for human or animal) tasks, such as manually restraining animals. On the other hand, such teaching opportunities don’t always come along often, and, since they can be dangerous or stressful, there’s always the desire to just have the most experience folks do the job to get it over with quickly and safely. But then those people eventually leave the facility, and then you have a knowledge gap, unless you’ve trained people to take over those tasks… which you can only do if they’ve been given hands-on experience.

A controversial historical theory – when early humans first began hunting the wild turkey, they did not do so for food. They did so for self-defense. The males of this species are among the most pugnacious of species I’ve ever encountered. Sure, I may have told some stories about having to fend of male rheas, or greater curassows, but there were days when those birds left me alone. Never in my six years working with wild turkeys did I ever approach that exhibit without the male waiting for me at the gate, ready for a throw down.

View attachment 782880

While I’d worked with domestic turkeys at a few non-AZA zoos (including one where they were later banished after the male was attacking children in the petting area), my experience with wild turkeys is limited to one AZA zoo. The turkeys – a flock of one male (perhaps inevitably named "Tom"), three females, all flight-restricted – shared a large, wooded paddock with a herd of white-tailed deer. The exhibit had several large trees (smaller shrubs would have been eaten by the deer), mostly pine, but a few oaks, dropping acorns, and was carpeted with a deep layer of pine needles and fallen leaves, which provided opportunities for foraging for insects and other invertebrates. There was a pool at one end of the exhibit, which provided drinking water, as well as a large area of earth which we kept raked down to the dirt for dust bathing. A ladder-like series of perches had been constructed to provide safe sleeping spaces off the ground. At the back of the yard was an open-fronted shed for shelter, not that I ever saw the turkeys use it.

The birds were fed Mazuri gamebird pellets, which I’d carry to the yard in a bucket or scoop every morning, and then fling in a wide arc as I left the exhibit. This reduced the likelihood of the deer scarfing it all up (the deer were fed their diet in pans). Sometimes I’d also toss some mealworms or frozen crickets, though it did seem like the turkeys spent a fair amount of their time foraging for natural food.

The male, as I’ve said, was an absolute nuisance. Thankfully, his aggression was so single-minded that it made him very easy to catch up in the mornings. I’d stand behind a little catch pen, using a cable to pull up the guillotine door that led to the yard – to get close to me, he’d rush into the pen, and then I’d lower the door behind him, which allowed me to clean the exhibit. If I did not do this – and there were days that I tried – it would easily take three times as long to service the exhibit, since I’d constantly be turning around to push him back with the rake and shovel. It was much more efficient overall to just have him locked up so I could clean. Despite his aggression to keepers, he never showed any inclination to harass or fight with the deer that he shared a yard with, or any of the native wildlife that entered the pen.

When you’re a keeper, one of the most stressful jobs of every day is doing your morning check ins, going from exhibit to exhibit to do a head count and make sure all animals are present, alive, and well. It can be its most stressful when you are missing an animal, even if it’s one that you know is an excellent hider, and you can eat up a lot of your mornings somedays trying to find the elusive ones. The opposite is also true, in that sometimes you come in and find an animal that you weren’t expecting. And I don’t always mean a baby.

One day, we were doing morning checks when we discovered that we did not have four adult wild turkeys on exhibit – we had five. An actual wild female had decided to join our flock. For the next few weeks she came and went as she pleased (alarming visitors when she would fly in and out of the exhibit, which led them to suspect that the other turkeys were really wild as well). Then, one day, after being absent for quite some time, she came back – with chicks. She appeared to have mated with our captive male, went off and laid eggs somewhere, and then brought her brood over for a visit. Some of the chicks were, inevitably, lost to predators, but enough stuck around to make a pretty cool experience for visitors… and for us.

As a turkey keeper, you will inevitably get very, very tired of visitors making jokes about Thanksgiving dinner or otherwise eating your turkeys. And no, I did not especially like our male turkey but c'mon - do I make jokes about eating your kids? I suppose it always annoyed me a little more because, deep down, I knew that if any of these tough guys found themselves in Tom's enclosure without a gun or a bow, he'd mop the floor with them in thirty seconds flat.

You have brought up two very interesting points.
The first one, regarding getting the appropriate opportunity of handling animals properly and safely, for you and the animals is usually, in my experience is when you least expect it . Obviously, during a keeper training, handling animals should be part of it but, just handling an animal can cause unnecessary stress to the animal,unless you use ambassador animals which are used to handling. As you said, it's a difficult situation. Saying that, I can remember a time when alot of people coming in to a career as a keeper were from what I would call a stockman background, from farming for example. This has changed in the last 25/30 years since zoos have been asking for higher qualifications.
Second, you mentioned the dreaded,first thing in the morning checks. It doesn't matter how long you have worked with animals, it doesn't get any easier. Personally, it defines my mood for the rest of the day!!

 

[Aardwolf]

Today, I’ll talk about the three mid-sized tortoises – the leopard, the radiated, and, the species I’ve worked with the most by far, the African spur-thighed tortoise, which is normally just referred to by its species name, sulcata (so as to eliminate confusion with, say, Testudo graeca). I’ve worked with the radiated at one non-AZA zoo, the leopard at one non-AZA zoo, and the sulcate at two AZA and two non-AZA zoos.

Care and husbandry of these species has not, in my experience, been that different from that of the two giant tortoises, which we’ve covered earlier. It mostly comes down to differences of scale. And in my experience, the main thing that scale/size of the animals changes is that it’s a lot easier to move them – which mostly has implications for weather.

Moving a large Galapagos or Aldabra tortoise – especially one which is not interested in being moved – is a major challenge. With the exception of the largest sulcatas, however, the other tortoises can relatively simply be picked up and carried. This has positive welfare implications in the spring and fall; whereas your larger tortoises might have to stay cooped up for longer because you can’t trust the weather not to turn on you, you have the option to running the smaller ones outside on a nice day in the middle of February, letting them get some sun and some grazing in, and then scooping them back up and getting them inside again before the temps dip.

A large tortoise is a powerful animal, and though they aren’t one of the true giants (though they are the largest non-insular tortoise species), I don’t know if I’ve ever seen a chelonian that’s been more of a force than a very large male sulcata. The animals are essentially bulldozers, capable of plowing through anything in their path. I’ve seen several cases of tortoises ramming their way through inadequate fencing, both in zoos and in the homes of private pet owners. You never want to be between a motivated male sulcata and what he’s got his mind set on – and what his mind is set on is usually females.

It’s not uncommon to hear visitors joke about the busy sex lives of zoo tortoises – they always seem to be mating, and generally do it loudly. I’ve found sulcatas to be the extremes in these cases. It was explained to me, when I was an impressionable young keeper, thusly: the desert habitats of the tortoise are so sparse that a male tortoise may go a very long time without finding a female. So when he finds one (or anything that looks like a female, say, a tortoise-shaped rock), it’s best to play it safe and mount her. That philosophy works well in the wild, but in a zoo setting, where the female is housed with the male all the time, the behavior can be excessive, even causing damage to the shell of the females. And not just the sulcatas – at one zoo I worked at, the sulcatas shared a habitat with the leopard tortoises, and the male sulcata mounted the leopard tortoises nonstop as well. I’ve often had to separate males from their exhibit mates to give the females some breathing room – but if the male can still see the females, he may try to batter this way towards them.

Compared to sulcatas, leopards and radiated tortoises have always struck me as rather demure (though not above some public displays of affection). The radiated tortoises that I worked with were the pride and joy of the zoo’s owner, which meant to things, as far as husbandry went. First, I was ordered to have them tightly locked up every night, which meant that not only did they have to be brought in at night, but the Galapagos and Aldabra tortoises that they shared a holding building with had to be brought in too (even on the lovely summer nights… which they had a great sense of humor about). Secondly, and looking back this was the strange one, he constantly wanted me to wash their shells. The carapace of a radiated tortoise is a thing of absolute beauty, and he wanted to make sure guests could appreciate it in all of its shiny splendor, rather than being covered in dust. So, I washed the shells constantly, and once a month rubbed them with mineral oil. True, they were very glossy and looked very nice… for twenty minutes. It never lasted.



Diets for the three species included a tortoise salad mix, though going lighter on the fruit - give them the chance and they'll gobble up all the fruit, leaving everything else, and then you're set to clean up some tortoise diarrhea after they make themselves sick from it. Grass should be the basis of the diet, whether tortoise hay (a commercial bagged mix, or orchard, timothy, etc) or actual grass in the summer. Pour the calcium powder with a heavy hand.

With so much of their body mass being bone, it’s not surprising that tortoises are especially susceptible to metabolic bone disease. I remember the last sulcata I worked with, a private pet that was surrendered to the zoo – his shell looked like that of a pancake tortoise crossed with a star tortoise, flat in some places, lumpy in others, and overall so soft that I feel like I could have folded him in half like a tortilla, and his legs were weak and wobbly. The resulting years of outdoor access, sunlight, and proper diet did wonders for him, but he was never going to win any tortoise beauty pageants after getting off to such a rough start. Many zoos have surrendered sulcatas in the same way that they have African grays – a species that serves as a cautionary tale about pet ownership, rather than a real wild animal, and in many non-AZA zoos, they are featured more as petting zoo animals (as they were at the two non-AZA zoos I worked at – kept behind a low wooden fence, for visitors to reach over and pet. I saw an amazing number of adults offering the tortoises the same baby bottles of milk that we sold them for feeding the lambs and goat kids). As common as they are, they’re seldom really exhibited as wild animals.

And, like every zoo, we get more offers for pet tortoises than we can possibly accommodate (At one AZA zoo, a PR person said that he was contacted by a journalist who wanted to know how we ensured that we weren’t getting tortoises smuggled from the wild. I told him that we’d never need to go to the wild for tortoises – we could probably just put a bin outside the front gate and it would be filled with donated ones in no time).

As a final note on interest for zoochatters who have interest in using tortoises for mixed exhibits in their speculative zoos – be wary. Sure, there are some combinations which can work very well; I’ve seen radiated tortoise and ring-tailed lemur mixed at a few facilities, for example. It can also end poorly. Tortoises are like tanks, and can – intentionally or otherwise – crush smaller animals. I’ve had a leopard tortoise squash a chicken before, for example, and in one of the most disturbing incidents of my career, I came in to one zoo in the morning and saw a keeper using a spatula to scrap the remains of a Bengal monitor off the plastron of a big sulcata after the two species had been overwintered together in one large indoor stall due to a shortage of space. Well, that was one way to open up space...

This brings us up to 70 species/groups highlighted in the notebook. I'll be out for a few days, but it'll pick up again sometime next week.

 

[tigris115]

As a final note on interest for zoochatters who have interest in using tortoises for mixed exhibits in their speculative zoos – be wary. Sure, there are some combinations which can work very well; I’ve seen radiated tortoise and ring-tailed lemur mixed at a few facilities, for example. It can also end poorly. Tortoises are like tanks, and can – intentionally or otherwise – crush smaller animals. I’ve had a leopard tortoise squash a chicken before, for example, and in one of the most disturbing incidents of my career, I came in to one zoo in the morning and saw a keeper using a spatula to scrap the remains of a Bengal monitor off the plastron of a big sulcata after the two species had been overwintered together in one large indoor stall due to a shortage of space. Well, that was one way to open up space...

I heard tortoises in the wild will crush birds on purpose for a snack. Extra calcium and protein

 

[Aardwolf]

@tigris115 , I've heard that as well, with occurences in both the zoo and in the wild. I can't say that I ever saw our tortoises attempt to eat their "kills," but who is to say that they wouldn't have if we'd left the bodies in with them? In those cases, I suspect it was more about clumsiness than deliberate predatory attention.

I was a slow convert to antelope – growing up, I thought of them more as food for more interesting animals – but if there was one group of antelope that really hooked him and served as my gateway to Bovidae, it was the horse antelope. This clade of three genera – Hippotragus, Oryx, and Addax – are some of the largest, most majestic, and most physically imposing of antelope, which explains why they’ve historically been so popular both with hunters and with zoos. They also are some of the most aggressive of antelopes, with definite husbandry implications for keepers.

My professional experience with addax is limited to my time at a non-AZA facility, where a small herd of addax was kept in the safari paddock along with zebras, bison, camels, and various deer and antelope. The addax (staff there pronounced them A-DAX, whereas I’d always heard them called “ADD-AX”) had a reputation for being aggressive, though I never saw any sign of that. They were, however, very standoffish, almost always gathered in a little knot by themselves at the furthest part of the safari, and only mingling with the other animals at the grain troughs at feeding time. Over the next six months, I only saw them approach a wagon tour that I was driving once, and my jaw dropped, I was so surprised. Not that they ate anything offered to them by the visitors, of course - they just stood there and looked at the guests with an appraisingly cool, somewhat jaded, eye. I suppose that in the eyes of zoo owner, the addax failed to earn their keep by being so asocial, so they were loaded up and shipped off, who knows where to?


One of our addax approaching me while I fed the safari - this was the only occasion each day when I usually saw them in the company of other species.

My history of working with the Arabian oryx is even more limited – consisting of a single male calf at a different non-AZA zoo. The calf – one of the first born to our small herd – failed to thrive and was pulled from the herd for me to hand-raise in our petting zoo area (the parents and the rest of the herd were in a separate section of the zoo – rearing young hoofstock was part of my team’s responsibility. We called our barn the Isle of Misfit Toys). Perhaps the mother simply wasn’t producing enough milk, but once the little male was on a bottle, he flourished (as with all of our hoofstock, we raised him on lamb replacer). The little guy was kept with a male addra gazelle calf that we were also raising at the same time, and the two loved to play by butting heads – both with each other, and then with us, whether we wanted to play or not. I admittedly had some concerns about the rapidly growing oryx – more than one of the hoofstock keepers floated the possibility that he was going to grow up to become a very dangerous animal, with two long, spear-like horns and absolutely no fear of humans. Whatever happened to him after he left my nursery, I cannot say.

Within AZA, I worked with a pair of female scimitar-horned oryxes at another zoo; I mentioned them briefly in my gazelle post as failed companions of our spunky-little Speke’s gazelle. The lived in a lush grassy paddock (oryx, ironically, are often displayed as savannah animals in zoos, rather than desert ones), with a holding barn at the back. Up until this point in my career, I’d never worked antelope in a protected contact situation, and I found it fascinating that I could go in with the cheetahs in the next exhibit, but was ordered to always shift the oryx into holding before I serviced their exhibit.



That same zoo at which I raised the Arabian oryx calf also served as a holding facility for the owner’s animal transport business, and we frequently were tasked with taking care of animals that were laying over at the zoo while he was on the road. One such layover resulted in one of the closest shaves I’d ever experienced.

On the morning of this return from one trek, he parked the truck out back, then tossed me the keys to the adjacent trailer. He told me (very sleepily) that there were three crates of parrots in the second stall, and that I should bring them into the reptile house to keep warm for the night. Then, he disappeared for the bathroom, kitchen, and bed, those being his priorities.

I took the keys. I went out to the driveway. I opened the second stall. There weren’t parrots inside.

Instead, I was looking into the eyes of a very large and very cantankerous bull sable antelope, each horn thicker than my wrist. I had one millisecond to decide whether I should a) slam the door shut and lock it, or b) run like hell. Thankfully, my body went on autopilot while my brain was still deciding, and it settled on “a.” Half a second after I latched the door shut, the entire trailer shook as the bull crashed his horns into the side of the trailer. My boss, his fly down, came stomping outside, wanting to know what the ruckus was and why hadn’t I gotten those parrots inside yet, what was he paying me for, etc.

It turns out that the parrots were in the third stall.

 

[Strathmorezoo]

@tigris115 , I've heard that as well, with occurences in both the zoo and in the wild. I can't say that I ever saw our tortoises attempt to eat their "kills," but who is to say that they wouldn't have if we'd left the bodies in with them? In those cases, I suspect it was more about clumsiness than deliberate predatory attention.

I was a slow convert to antelope – growing up, I thought of them more as food for more interesting animals – but if there was one group of antelope that really hooked him and served as my gateway to Bovidae, it was the horse antelope. This clade of three genera – Hippotragus, Oryx, and Addax – are some of the largest, most majestic, and most physically imposing of antelope, which explains why they’ve historically been so popular both with hunters and with zoos. They also are some of the most aggressive of antelopes, with definite husbandry implications for keepers.

My professional experience with addax is limited to my time at a non-AZA facility, where a small herd of addax was kept in the safari paddock along with zebras, bison, camels, and various deer and antelope. The addax (staff there pronounced them A-DAX, whereas I’d always heard them called “ADD-AX”) had a reputation for being aggressive, though I never saw any sign of that. They were, however, very standoffish, almost always gathered in a little knot by themselves at the furthest part of the safari, and only mingling with the other animals at the grain troughs at feeding time. Over the next six months, I only saw them approach a wagon tour that I was driving once, and my jaw dropped, I was so surprised. Not that they ate anything offered to them by the visitors, of course - they just stood there and looked at the guests with an appraisingly cool, somewhat jaded, eye. I suppose that in the eyes of zoo owner, the addax failed to earn their keep by being so asocial, so they were loaded up and shipped off, who knows where to?

View attachment 784841
One of our addax approaching me while I fed the safari - this was the only occasion each day when I usually saw them in the company of other species.

My history of working with the Arabian oryx is even more limited – consisting of a single male calf at a different non-AZA zoo. The calf – one of the first born to our small herd – failed to thrive and was pulled from the herd for me to hand-raise in our petting zoo area (the parents and the rest of the herd were in a separate section of the zoo – rearing young hoofstock was part of my team’s responsibility. We called our barn the Isle of Misfit Toys). Perhaps the mother simply wasn’t producing enough milk, but once the little male was on a bottle, he flourished (as with all of our hoofstock, we raised him on lamb replacer). The little guy was kept with a male addra gazelle calf that we were also raising at the same time, and the two loved to play by butting heads – both with each other, and then with us, whether we wanted to play or not. I admittedly had some concerns about the rapidly growing oryx – more than one of the hoofstock keepers floated the possibility that he was going to grow up to become a very dangerous animal, with two long, spear-like horns and absolutely no fear of humans. Whatever happened to him after he left my nursery, I cannot say.

Within AZA, I worked with a pair of female scimitar-horned oryxes at another zoo; I mentioned them briefly in my gazelle post as failed companions of our spunky-little Speke’s gazelle. The lived in a lush grassy paddock (oryx, ironically, are often displayed as savannah animals in zoos, rather than desert ones), with a holding barn at the back. Up until this point in my career, I’d never worked antelope in a protected contact situation, and I found it fascinating that I could go in with the cheetahs in the next exhibit, but was ordered to always shift the oryx into holding before I serviced their exhibit.

View attachment 784838

That same zoo at which I raised the Arabian oryx calf also served as a holding facility for the owner’s animal transport business, and we frequently were tasked with taking care of animals that were laying over at the zoo while he was on the road. One such layover resulted in one of the closest shaves I’d ever experienced.

On the morning of this return from one trek, he parked the truck out back, then tossed me the keys to the adjacent trailer. He told me (very sleepily) that there were three crates of parrots in the second stall, and that I should bring them into the reptile house to keep warm for the night. Then, he disappeared for the bathroom, kitchen, and bed, those being his priorities.

I took the keys. I went out to the driveway. I opened the second stall. There weren’t parrots inside.

Instead, I was looking into the eyes of a very large and very cantankerous bull sable antelope, each horn thicker than my wrist. I had one millisecond to decide whether I should a) slam the door shut and lock it, or b) run like hell. Thankfully, my body went on autopilot while my brain was still deciding, and it settled on “a.” Half a second after I latched the door shut, the entire trailer shook as the bull crashed his horns into the side of the trailer. My boss, his fly down, came stomping outside, wanting to know what the ruckus was and why hadn’t I gotten those parrots inside yet, what was he paying me for, etc.

It turns out that the parrots were in the third stall.

I worked with Addax many years ago and never saw aggression towards myself or another keeper. However, we never went in with them . Most of their food was offered to them in their indoor stalls and during feeding I would reach through the bars and scratch their heads and ears ,carefully, watching for any sudden head movement. They seemed to enjoy the attention. By the way, the description of your boss was funny

 

[Aardwolf]

I blame a clouded leopard for not getting a job, once.

It was about twenty years ago, and I was at Nashville Zoo for a keeper interview – a hoofstock keeper position, to be precise. Nashville was still a fairly new zoo back then and I didn’t know much about it, but one thing I did know about was their fame (even then) with clouded leopards. So, after visiting the elephants (this was back when Nashville had elephants) and giraffes and bongos, my interviewer, as an afterthought, took me into one of the off-exhibit buildings, where, behind a chainlink gate, there was a full-grown clouded leopard, eagerly rubbing against the door.

Then, she opened the door.

A second later, I felt the weight of the cat draped across my shoulders, with the thick tail (which scent led me suspect had recently been dragged through pee) winding its way under my nose. I was absolutely in love, and practically gushed with joy.

I’m pretty sure that, at the end of the interview, the curator thought it over and decided, “He’s a nice enough kid – but hoofstock doesn’t seem to be where his heart is.”

I got my chance to work with a clouded leopard of my own about five or so years later at a non-AZA facility. We had just sent out our breeding binturong pair, which I was very sad about – but that immediately was forgotten when I learned we were getting a clouded leopard to replace them. I immediately set to work re-perching the sad, shabby little Behlen cage as best as I could, until I felt like I could barely walk in it, it was such a tangle of branches. We also made two important safety modifications – adding a small shift area, and adding a double-door vestibule to the front of the exhibit. When the owner’s truck pulled into the parking lot and I saw the crate in the trailer, I was thrilled.



Sabre (that was the name she came with – pronounced, I was told, at her old zoo as Sabra, like the hummus) would have been a gorgeous cat – if you ever saw her, which no visitors ever did. From the moment we opened the door of the crate, she poured herself, like liquid, immediately into the nest box and did not emerge. Days would pass at a time without me catching a glimpse of her in the daylight. Her coming out to shift was absolutely out of the question. So, two things happened. One, I was forced to service the exhibit with her in it, albeit hidden in the box. And two, I started working late. Very late.

At the same time that Sabre arrived, we were building a new budgie aviary (looking back, I’m amazed that they all didn’t escape on day one, our work was so shoddy), and I usually didn’t leave the zoo until it was too dark to see the wire I was clipping. And I’d take advantage of the dark and quiet and the fact that everyone else was in a hurry to get home, and didn’t mind if I locked up, to spend some time socializing with Sabre. At night, she was extraordinary, a ghost; I’d have my flashlight trained on an empty branch in her enclosure, and she would materialize on it before my eyes. The first time I went to check on her, she popped up on a limb three feet in front of me without making a sound – one minute there was nothing, the next her eyes were boring directly into mine.

Sabre was mostly fed Nebraska horse meat, supplemented with rabbits and chickens that we bred on zoo grounds. One day we gave her a live rabbit, which is not an experience that I would recommend repeating ever – those screams stay with you, and captive big cats have a tendency to bite a live prey animal, get startled by the scream, let it go, and then repeat the process a few times. If there was one major challenge taking care of her, it was her nest box. While she tended to poop outside at night, it still got pretty gross, and she wouldn’t willingly come out during the day to let us clean it. So, every once in a while, two of us would go in, we’d scoot her out of the box, and one keeper would keep an eye on her while the other cleaned it quickly (the owner hated this – he hated any two-person job that he felt should have been a one person). Ideally, we would have had two nest boxes in the cage so she could move from one to the other (she always paced frantically when kicked out of the box), but there simply wasn’t room. I recommended moving the pheasants out of the Behlen cage next door, and then constructing a tunnel between the cages, doubling her available space and giving her more of a chance to get away from us, but this was flatly rejected.


Sabre popping out of her nest box
Eventually we got her using the shift cage, but she was so stressed in it (it was, to be fair, pretty tiny), so again, we tried to keep it quick. I was training a keeper (ironically one who had been at this zoo longer than me) on her, when the keeper decided I was taking too long and that Sabre was too stressed, and she opened the shift door. While I was still in the exhibit. Everything ended up being fine, but man, I don’t know if I’ve ever yelled at a keeper so much or so loudly.

To build up her trust and confidence, I took to holding her diet in the fridge until the end of the day (that way it wouldn’t get all fly-blown while she hid in the box) and hand fed it to her, palming meatballs up to the mesh for her to gently pluck from my hand. Well, usually gently. There was the one time I tried it, weeks later, during the daylight hours. Our director and the owner were losing patience with Sabre and her unwillingness to come out in public, and there was already talk of selling her and trying something else. I was trying to demonstrate to the director that Sabre was coming out her shell. Perhaps it was the audience, but this time Sabre did not respond quite as intended. She reached her paws out and grab me, her claws hooked into the back on my hand, pulling my hand in, and (gently) began to mouth my fingers. A little blood was drawn from the claws, but she was being very gentle, and I know that she meant no harm. In the end, I failed. I left this zoo a few months later, wanting to get back into AZA facilities. I was told by a friend who remained that Sabre was packed off and sold not that long after.


Saying goodbye to Sabre on our last day together

It probably was for the best, anyway. If they’d kept her there, the owner would have eventually decided we had to breed her to try to get some value from her – and I’m pretty sure that she would have died. Clouded leopards historically have been among the most challenging of cats to breed in zoos, largely due to male aggression towards females. A number of solutions have been suggested, but what the zoo community in the US has largely settled on is hand-rearing. They are one of the few mammal species which is regularly hand-raised in AZA facilities. Male and female cubs from different litters are hand-raised and paired off when still very young, growing up together. This does seem to blunt the aggressive tendencies of the males, but it does have its drawbacks as well. For one thing, that pair is now stuck together – you can’t re-pair them easily for genetic matches down the road. Secondly, you run the risk of losing natural behaviors when you hand-rear. Still, it has worked, and many more successful births have resulted – with Nashville being one of the leaders.

 

[Strathmorezoo]

I blame a clouded leopard for not getting a job, once.

It was about twenty years ago, and I was at Nashville Zoo for a keeper interview – a hoofstock keeper position, to be precise. Nashville was still a fairly new zoo back then and I didn’t know much about it, but one thing I did know about was their fame (even then) with clouded leopards. So, after visiting the elephants (this was back when Nashville had elephants) and giraffes and bongos, my interviewer, as an afterthought, took me into one of the off-exhibit buildings, where, behind a chainlink gate, there was a full-grown clouded leopard, eagerly rubbing against the door.

Then, she opened the door.

A second later, I felt the weight of the cat draped across my shoulders, with the thick tail (which scent led me suspect had recently been dragged through pee) winding its way under my nose. I was absolutely in love, and practically gushed with joy.

I’m pretty sure that, at the end of the interview, the curator thought it over and decided, “He’s a nice enough kid – but hoofstock doesn’t seem to be where his heart is.”

I got my chance to work with a clouded leopard of my own about five or so years later at a non-AZA facility. We had just sent out our breeding binturong pair, which I was very sad about – but that immediately was forgotten when I learned we were getting a clouded leopard to replace them. I immediately set to work re-perching the sad, shabby little Behlen cage as best as I could, until I felt like I could barely walk in it, it was such a tangle of branches. We also made two important safety modifications – adding a small shift area, and adding a double-door vestibule to the front of the exhibit. When the owner’s truck pulled into the parking lot and I saw the crate in the trailer, I was thrilled.

View attachment 785277

Sabre (that was the name she came with – pronounced, I was told, at her old zoo as Sabra, like the hummus) would have been a gorgeous cat – if you ever saw her, which no visitors ever did. From the moment we opened the door of the crate, she poured herself, like liquid, immediately into the nest box and did not emerge. Days would pass at a time without me catching a glimpse of her in the daylight. Her coming out to shift was absolutely out of the question. So, two things happened. One, I was forced to service the exhibit with her in it, albeit hidden in the box. And two, I started working late. Very late.

At the same time that Sabre arrived, we were building a new budgie aviary (looking back, I’m amazed that they all didn’t escape on day one, our work was so shoddy), and I usually didn’t leave the zoo until it was too dark to see the wire I was clipping. And I’d take advantage of the dark and quiet and the fact that everyone else was in a hurry to get home, and didn’t mind if I locked up, to spend some time socializing with Sabre. At night, she was extraordinary, a ghost; I’d have my flashlight trained on an empty branch in her enclosure, and she would materialize on it before my eyes. The first time I went to check on her, she popped up on a limb three feet in front of me without making a sound – one minute there was nothing, the next her eyes were boring directly into mine.

Sabre was mostly fed Nebraska horse meat, supplemented with rabbits and chickens that we bred on zoo grounds. One day we gave her a live rabbit, which is not an experience that I would recommend repeating ever – those screams stay with you, and captive big cats have a tendency to bite a live prey animal, get startled by the scream, let it go, and then repeat the process a few times. If there was one major challenge taking care of her, it was her nest box. While she tended to poop outside at night, it still got pretty gross, and she wouldn’t willingly come out during the day to let us clean it. So, every once in a while, two of us would go in, we’d scoot her out of the box, and one keeper would keep an eye on her while the other cleaned it quickly (the owner hated this – he hated any two-person job that he felt should have been a one person). Ideally, we would have had two nest boxes in the cage so she could move from one to the other (she always paced frantically when kicked out of the box), but there simply wasn’t room. I recommended moving the pheasants out of the Behlen cage next door, and then constructing a tunnel between the cages, doubling her available space and giving her more of a chance to get away from us, but this was flatly rejected.

View attachment 785275
Sabre popping out of her nest box
Eventually we got her using the shift cage, but she was so stressed in it (it was, to be fair, pretty tiny), so again, we tried to keep it quick. I was training a keeper (ironically one who had been at this zoo longer than me) on her, when the keeper decided I was taking too long and that Sabre was too stressed, and she opened the shift door. While I was still in the exhibit. Everything ended up being fine, but man, I don’t know if I’ve ever yelled at a keeper so much or so loudly.

To build up her trust and confidence, I took to holding her diet in the fridge until the end of the day (that way it wouldn’t get all fly-blown while she hid in the box) and hand fed it to her, palming meatballs up to the mesh for her to gently pluck from my hand. Well, usually gently. There was the one time I tried it, weeks later, during the daylight hours. Our director and the owner were losing patience with Sabre and her unwillingness to come out in public, and there was already talk of selling her and trying something else. I was trying to demonstrate to the director that Sabre was coming out her shell. Perhaps it was the audience, but this time Sabre did not respond quite as intended. She reached her paws out and grab me, her claws hooked into the back on my hand, pulling my hand in, and (gently) began to mouth my fingers. A little blood was drawn from the claws, but she was being very gentle, and I know that she meant no harm. In the end, I failed. I left this zoo a few months later, wanting to get back into AZA facilities. I was told by a friend who remained that Sabre was packed off and sold not that long after.

View attachment 785276
Saying goodbye to Sabre on our last day together

It probably was for the best, anyway. If they’d kept her there, the owner would have eventually decided we had to breed her to try to get some value from her – and I’m pretty sure that she would have died. Clouded leopards historically have been among the most challenging of cats to breed in zoos, largely due to male aggression towards females. A number of solutions have been suggested, but what the zoo community in the US has largely settled on is hand-rearing. They are one of the few mammal species which is regularly hand-raised in AZA facilities. Male and female cubs from different litters are hand-raised and paired off when still very young, growing up together. This does seem to blunt the aggressive tendencies of the males, but it does have its drawbacks as well. For one thing, that pair is now stuck together – you can’t re-pair them easily for genetic matches down the road. Secondly, you run the risk of losing natural behaviors when you hand-rear. Still, it has worked, and many more successful births have resulted – with Nashville being one of the leaders.

I blame a clouded leopard for not getting a job, once.

It was about twenty years ago, and I was at Nashville Zoo for a keeper interview – a hoofstock keeper position, to be precise. Nashville was still a fairly new zoo back then and I didn’t know much about it, but one thing I did know about was their fame (even then) with clouded leopards. So, after visiting the elephants (this was back when Nashville had elephants) and giraffes and bongos, my interviewer, as an afterthought, took me into one of the off-exhibit buildings, where, behind a chainlink gate, there was a full-grown clouded leopard, eagerly rubbing against the door.

Then, she opened the door.

A second later, I felt the weight of the cat draped across my shoulders, with the thick tail (which scent led me suspect had recently been dragged through pee) winding its way under my nose. I was absolutely in love, and practically gushed with joy.

I’m pretty sure that, at the end of the interview, the curator thought it over and decided, “He’s a nice enough kid – but hoofstock doesn’t seem to be where his heart is.”

I got my chance to work with a clouded leopard of my own about five or so years later at a non-AZA facility. We had just sent out our breeding binturong pair, which I was very sad about – but that immediately was forgotten when I learned we were getting a clouded leopard to replace them. I immediately set to work re-perching the sad, shabby little Behlen cage as best as I could, until I felt like I could barely walk in it, it was such a tangle of branches. We also made two important safety modifications – adding a small shift area, and adding a double-door vestibule to the front of the exhibit. When the owner’s truck pulled into the parking lot and I saw the crate in the trailer, I was thrilled.

View attachment 785277

Sabre (that was the name she came with – pronounced, I was told, at her old zoo as Sabra, like the hummus) would have been a gorgeous cat – if you ever saw her, which no visitors ever did. From the moment we opened the door of the crate, she poured herself, like liquid, immediately into the nest box and did not emerge. Days would pass at a time without me catching a glimpse of her in the daylight. Her coming out to shift was absolutely out of the question. So, two things happened. One, I was forced to service the exhibit with her in it, albeit hidden in the box. And two, I started working late. Very late.

At the same time that Sabre arrived, we were building a new budgie aviary (looking back, I’m amazed that they all didn’t escape on day one, our work was so shoddy), and I usually didn’t leave the zoo until it was too dark to see the wire I was clipping. And I’d take advantage of the dark and quiet and the fact that everyone else was in a hurry to get home, and didn’t mind if I locked up, to spend some time socializing with Sabre. At night, she was extraordinary, a ghost; I’d have my flashlight trained on an empty branch in her enclosure, and she would materialize on it before my eyes. The first time I went to check on her, she popped up on a limb three feet in front of me without making a sound – one minute there was nothing, the next her eyes were boring directly into mine.

Sabre was mostly fed Nebraska horse meat, supplemented with rabbits and chickens that we bred on zoo grounds. One day we gave her a live rabbit, which is not an experience that I would recommend repeating ever – those screams stay with you, and captive big cats have a tendency to bite a live prey animal, get startled by the scream, let it go, and then repeat the process a few times. If there was one major challenge taking care of her, it was her nest box. While she tended to poop outside at night, it still got pretty gross, and she wouldn’t willingly come out during the day to let us clean it. So, every once in a while, two of us would go in, we’d scoot her out of the box, and one keeper would keep an eye on her while the other cleaned it quickly (the owner hated this – he hated any two-person job that he felt should have been a one person). Ideally, we would have had two nest boxes in the cage so she could move from one to the other (she always paced frantically when kicked out of the box), but there simply wasn’t room. I recommended moving the pheasants out of the Behlen cage next door, and then constructing a tunnel between the cages, doubling her available space and giving her more of a chance to get away from us, but this was flatly rejected.

View attachment 785275
Sabre popping out of her nest box
Eventually we got her using the shift cage, but she was so stressed in it (it was, to be fair, pretty tiny), so again, we tried to keep it quick. I was training a keeper (ironically one who had been at this zoo longer than me) on her, when the keeper decided I was taking too long and that Sabre was too stressed, and she opened the shift door. While I was still in the exhibit. Everything ended up being fine, but man, I don’t know if I’ve ever yelled at a keeper so much or so loudly.

To build up her trust and confidence, I took to holding her diet in the fridge until the end of the day (that way it wouldn’t get all fly-blown while she hid in the box) and hand fed it to her, palming meatballs up to the mesh for her to gently pluck from my hand. Well, usually gently. There was the one time I tried it, weeks later, during the daylight hours. Our director and the owner were losing patience with Sabre and her unwillingness to come out in public, and there was already talk of selling her and trying something else. I was trying to demonstrate to the director that Sabre was coming out her shell. Perhaps it was the audience, but this time Sabre did not respond quite as intended. She reached her paws out and grab me, her claws hooked into the back on my hand, pulling my hand in, and (gently) began to mouth my fingers. A little blood was drawn from the claws, but she was being very gentle, and I know that she meant no harm. In the end, I failed. I left this zoo a few months later, wanting to get back into AZA facilities. I was told by a friend who remained that Sabre was packed off and sold not that long after.

View attachment 785276
Saying goodbye to Sabre on our last day together

It probably was for the best, anyway. If they’d kept her there, the owner would have eventually decided we had to breed her to try to get some value from her – and I’m pretty sure that she would have died. Clouded leopards historically have been among the most challenging of cats to breed in zoos, largely due to male aggression towards females. A number of solutions have been suggested, but what the zoo community in the US has largely settled on is hand-rearing. They are one of the few mammal species which is regularly hand-raised in AZA facilities. Male and female cubs from different litters are hand-raised and paired off when still very young, growing up together. This does seem to blunt the aggressive tendencies of the males, but it does have its drawbacks as well. For one thing, that pair is now stuck together – you can’t re-pair them easily for genetic matches down the road. Secondly, you run the risk of losing natural behaviors when you hand-rear. Still, it has worked, and many more successful births have resulted – with Nashville being one of the leaders.

Can I ask, why did you feed a live rabbit ?

 

[Aardwolf]

Can I ask, why did you feed a live rabbit ?

Seemed like a good idea at the time.

We were selecting a rabbit from our breeding hutch to feed her, we were already accustomed to feeding the occasional live rabbit or chicken to the pythons, and we thought that maybe she'd be quicker and more humane at dispatching it than we would be (which was of special interest to me - a lot of the other keepers were uncomfortable with dispatching rabbits and chickens, so most of the time it fell to me - I was interested in outsourcing the job to the leopard if I could). That assumption was... mistaken.

I'm aware that the culture and controversy around live feeding - even less controversial species such as fish - is very different in the UK than it is in the US. I'll happily feed out live fish, and in some situations a rodent (though generally only if I think it's necessary for husbandry, like an animal that won't feed under other conditions). And I'd be fine feeding live prey as conditioning for a release program. After giving Sabre her rabbit, I seem to remember us all standing there for a moment, and then saying, "We're all okay with not trying that again? Everyone? Ok, good..."

 

[Aardwolf]

For today’s post, we’ll look at two groups of parrots, inevitably tied together through common association in zoos – the rainbow lorikeet, and the budgerigar. These, of course, are the birds most often seen in zoos for use in feeding aviaries. My experience with each species comes from non-AZA zoos, having worked with each species at one (different) facility.

I worked with the lorikeets first. We called them rainbow lorikeets, because that’s how they were all defined at the time, but in the years since the species has been carved up into several species, and we had some coconuts, sunsets, etc in our flock (along with a single red lory). The flock consisted of about thirty birds, housed in a fairly spacious aviary with an attached holding building (one of the few proper indoor holdings with actual gas heating we had in the whole zoo). The outdoor aviary was grassy, with a gravel path forming a loop through it, lined with rope-and-post fencing to keep visitors on the path. There was a fair bit of perching, most of it lining the path and with distance and height in mind to keep the birds close to visitors.



Every day, I would mix up a batch of the nectar – a powder stirred into warm water until it was the consistency of a somewhat thin smoothie. I have a very strong sweet tooth and am addicted to sugar, but I have to admit, I found the liquid almost nauseating in its sickly-sweet smell, and I think I would have sooner drunk bleach than the mixture... which I mentioned because many of my coworkers did take a shot of it... once (you yourselves, ZooChatters, have likely fed lorikeets at a zoo before, and may not have noticed the smell. It’s not nearly so strong when it’s in a small cup, as opposed to a huge pitcher). On days when we expected to be very busy, we’d water the mixture down a bit more to make it last longer throughout the day. The nectar was supplemented each day with chopped produce, sometimes mixed into the nectar, sometimes scattered around the yard.

Lorikeet management was focused around the feedings. The aviary was locked (but visible from the outside) and only open at feeding times. When we were at the busy open season, there were three half-hour public feedings a day. When possible on busy days, we tried to have two keepers present – one to sit at the entrance vestibule, take money, and dispense the cups and explain the rules, the other to watch the inside of the aviary and monitor interactions. Visitors were, I will say, fairly well behaved in the aviary, as in I never saw anyone try to grab or harm a bird. Likewise, I never had a lorikeet try to bite a visitor. The more frequent problem we had was visitors freaking out – I was not prepared for how many people are absolutely terrified of birds and just don’t realize it until one lands on them. On some busy days, I would have to come back at the end of the day with a new pitcher to feed the lorikeets – so many visitors would suddenly panic when a bird would land on them that they’d scream and throw their cup into the gravel, from which the birds were able to get very little of it. On very busy days the nectar would be consumed by noon and the lorikeets, fat and full, would be resting on their perches – we’d have to deal with angry parents who wanted to buy nectar, even after we told them the birds were full. We’d relent and make some up anyway – only for parents to then be upset that the birds wouldn’t come to them.



At the end of the day, all unconsumed nectar was poured into big flat feeding pans on the ground, which the lorikeets would lick clean in short order. I’d assume that they got most of their moisture from their diet – both the nectar and the fruit – but water bowls were also provided.

Winters were my least favorite time to be a lorikeet keeper. True, we were closed and that meant I didn’t have to rush through my day to be ready for feedings several times a day. But in the spring, summer, and fall, they were mostly fed outside. In the winter, they were fed indoors – and that meant that I had to clean indoors. Nectar runs right through lorikeets, and each day their holding building would be covered with the whitewash of their sticky, smelly feces. Cleaning the floor was bad enough, but their feces would literally paint the stainless steel mesh that fronted their holding, and it took forever to scrub clean. All of this while surrounded by their constant chattering in the echoing little building, and it was enough to make you scream… but that only would have added to the noise.

A few months before I left that zoo, lorikeets just started… dying. At a rate of about one every few days. No symptoms, one would be healthy one day, and then be found deceased the next. No cause was known, and our boss was notoriously stingy about calling a vet, convinced in his own ability to solve all problems himself, while simultaneously furious at us for not stopping the deaths. We tried everything, and eventually took to mixing the antibiotic tetracycline into their nectar (I spent a lot of time frantically reading everything I could about lorikeet health and eventually thought that Chlamydia seemed to be the most likely cause, which led us to the tetracycline). Deaths immediately stopped – but would start again if we were to stop mixing it in. As long as they stayed on it, they were very healthy and hearty. Withdraw it, bad things happened.

My boss was keenly aware of each lorikeet loss – not only did each lorikeet cost hundreds of dollars, but if the flock dipped too low, we wouldn’t have an effective feeding aviary. For that reason, he was also unwilling to let us provide nest boxes and try to breed the birds to replenish numbers, as he was concerned that if they paired off, they wouldn’t take food from people. The whole place really was a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t place.

With the expense of lorikeets (both as individuals and in terms of feeding), it’s no surprise that many zoos, especially the smaller ones, began switching to their less-expensive alternative. Budgerigars are much, much cheaper to feed and obtain, and at my next zoo, we converted an old aviary (which itself was almost empty at the time) to a budgiary, adding a small holding building and redoing the wire. Over 500 budgies were obtained for it. The aviary was similar to the lorikeet aviary at the other zoo, but had river rock substrate instead of grass, with the idea that we would just hose it down every day. Their indoor holding building had a large, wire cage, suspended off the ground over a tarp. Each day, we’d drag that tarp outside and soak it clean, putting another tarp in its place while it dried.

The budgies were fed seed sticks on paraffin wax, which our gift shop staff churned out constantly whenever they didn’t have customers. Like the lorikeet nectar, I’m uncertain as to how much of the food actually made it to the birds, and I found an amazing number of sticks in all sorts of enclosures where they shouldn’t have been – even floating in the alligator pond (presumably people tossed them to make the gators move?). Unfortunately, all of those dropped sticks had a way of attracting other animals – and the river rocks in the aviary, it seemed, formed a perfect habitat for rats. Some of which, I suspect, developed a taste for budgies.

Given a choice between the two, I much preferred working with lorikeets. When you work with a flock of thirty birds, you’re still able to recognize them as individuals and get to know their character and personality and see their behavior. It felt like they were actual birds – whereas the budgies were too numerous, too indistinguishable, that they felt like a seed-eating machine. Also, it’s a lot easier to provide better welfare for a smaller flock of larger, more recognizable individuals. Sure, we had the disease problem with the lorikeets, but that was a boss problem, not a bird problem – if we’d had a proper vet, I’m sure we would have solved it much more easily. It was especially hard to keep the budgies safe during feedings, as with so many birds, and all smaller than the lorikeets, it was much easier for a budgie to wind up underfoot (we insisted that strollers be kept outside the aviary – but on busy days, we’d sometimes outsource budgie duty to volunteers or interns, who were a lot less assertive about enforcing that rule against pushy parents). It was hard being a budgiary keeper and NOT feel like you were constantly letting the birds down.

Perhaps as a result, but I find that when I visit other zoos, I’m able to enjoy a good lorikeet feeding aviary (when we have a Zoo Day for conferences, like AZA midyear, I’ll often take advantage and pop into one). I don’t think I’ve ever seen a budgie aviary and not felt a slight internal grimace.

 

[Strathmorezoo]

For today’s post, we’ll look at two groups of parrots, inevitably tied together through common association in zoos – the rainbow lorikeet, and the budgerigar. These, of course, are the birds most often seen in zoos for use in feeding aviaries. My experience with each species comes from non-AZA zoos, having worked with each species at one (different) facility.

I worked with the lorikeets first. We called them rainbow lorikeets, because that’s how they were all defined at the time, but in the years since the species has been carved up into several species, and we had some coconuts, sunsets, etc in our flock (along with a single red lory). The flock consisted of about thirty birds, housed in a fairly spacious aviary with an attached holding building (one of the few proper indoor holdings with a

For today’s post, we’ll look at two groups of parrots, inevitably tied together through common association in zoos – the rainbow lorikeet, and the budgerigar. These, of course, are the birds most often seen in zoos for use in feeding aviaries. My experience with each species comes from non-AZA zoos, having worked with each species at one (different) facility.

I worked with the lorikeets first. We called them rainbow lorikeets, because that’s how they were all defined at the time, but in the years since the species has been carved up into several species, and we had some coconuts, sunsets, etc in our flock (along with a single red lory). The flock consisted of about thirty birds, housed in a fairly spacious aviary with an attached holding building (one of the few proper indoor holdings with actual gas heating we had in the whole zoo). The outdoor aviary was grassy, with a gravel path forming a loop through it, lined with rope-and-post fencing to keep visitors on the path. There was a fair bit of perching, most of it lining the path and with distance and height in mind to keep the birds close to visitors.

View attachment 785631

Every day, I would mix up a batch of the nectar – a powder stirred into warm water until it was the consistency of a somewhat thin smoothie. I have a very strong sweet tooth and am addicted to sugar, but I have to admit, I found the liquid almost nauseating in its sickly-sweet smell, and I think I would have sooner drunk bleach than the mixture... which I mentioned because many of my coworkers did take a shot of it... once (you yourselves, ZooChatters, have likely fed lorikeets at a zoo before, and may not have noticed the smell. It’s not nearly so strong when it’s in a small cup, as opposed to a huge pitcher). On days when we expected to be very busy, we’d water the mixture down a bit more to make it last longer throughout the day. The nectar was supplemented each day with chopped produce, sometimes mixed into the nectar, sometimes scattered around the yard.

Lorikeet management was focused around the feedings. The aviary was locked (but visible from the outside) and only open at feeding times. When we were at the busy open season, there were three half-hour public feedings a day. When possible on busy days, we tried to have two keepers present – one to sit at the entrance vestibule, take money, and dispense the cups and explain the rules, the other to watch the inside of the aviary and monitor interactions. Visitors were, I will say, fairly well behaved in the aviary, as in I never saw anyone try to grab or harm a bird. Likewise, I never had a lorikeet try to bite a visitor. The more frequent problem we had was visitors freaking out – I was not prepared for how many people are absolutely terrified of birds and just don’t realize it until one lands on them. On some busy days, I would have to come back at the end of the day with a new pitcher to feed the lorikeets – so many visitors would suddenly panic when a bird would land on them that they’d scream and throw their cup into the gravel, from which the birds were able to get very little of it. On very busy days the nectar would be consumed by noon and the lorikeets, fat and full, would be resting on their perches – we’d have to deal with angry parents who wanted to buy nectar, even after we told them the birds were full. We’d relent and make some up anyway – only for parents to then be upset that the birds wouldn’t come to them.

View attachment 785632

At the end of the day, all unconsumed nectar was poured into big flat feeding pans on the ground, which the lorikeets would lick clean in short order. I’d assume that they got most of their moisture from their diet – both the nectar and the fruit – but water bowls were also provided.

Winters were my least favorite time to be a lorikeet keeper. True, we were closed and that meant I didn’t have to rush through my day to be ready for feedings several times a day. But in the spring, summer, and fall, they were mostly fed outside. In the winter, they were fed indoors – and that meant that I had to clean indoors. Nectar runs right through lorikeets, and each day their holding building would be covered with the whitewash of their sticky, smelly feces. Cleaning the floor was bad enough, but their feces would literally paint the stainless steel mesh that fronted their holding, and it took forever to scrub clean. All of this while surrounded by their constant chattering in the echoing little building, and it was enough to make you scream… but that only would have added to the noise.

A few months before I left that zoo, lorikeets just started… dying. At a rate of about one every few days. No symptoms, one would be healthy one day, and then be found deceased the next. No cause was known, and our boss was notoriously stingy about calling a vet, convinced in his own ability to solve all problems himself, while simultaneously furious at us for not stopping the deaths. We tried everything, and eventually took to mixing the antibiotic tetracycline into their nectar (I spent a lot of time frantically reading everything I could about lorikeet health and eventually thought that Chlamydia seemed to be the most likely cause, which led us to the tetracycline). Deaths immediately stopped – but would start again if we were to stop mixing it in. As long as they stayed on it, they were very healthy and hearty. Withdraw it, bad things happened.

My boss was keenly aware of each lorikeet loss – not only did each lorikeet cost hundreds of dollars, but if the flock dipped too low, we wouldn’t have an effective feeding aviary. For that reason, he was also unwilling to let us provide nest boxes and try to breed the birds to replenish numbers, as he was concerned that if they paired off, they wouldn’t take food from people. The whole place really was a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t place.

With the expense of lorikeets (both as individuals and in terms of feeding), it’s no surprise that many zoos, especially the smaller ones, began switching to their less-expensive alternative. Budgerigars are much, much cheaper to feed and obtain, and at my next zoo, we converted an old aviary (which itself was almost empty at the time) to a budgiary, adding a small holding building and redoing the wire. Over 500 budgies were obtained for it. The aviary was similar to the lorikeet aviary at the other zoo, but had river rock substrate instead of grass, with the idea that we would just hose it down every day. Their indoor holding building had a large, wire cage, suspended off the ground over a tarp. Each day, we’d drag that tarp outside and soak it clean, putting another tarp in its place while it dried.

The budgies were fed seed sticks on paraffin wax, which our gift shop staff churned out constantly whenever they didn’t have customers. Like the lorikeet nectar, I’m uncertain as to how much of the food actually made it to the birds, and I found an amazing number of sticks in all sorts of enclosures where they shouldn’t have been – even floating in the alligator pond (presumably people tossed them to make the gators move?). Unfortunately, all of those dropped sticks had a way of attracting other animals – and the river rocks in the aviary, it seemed, formed a perfect habitat for rats. Some of which, I suspect, developed a taste for budgies.

Given a choice between the two, I much preferred working with lorikeets. When you work with a flock of thirty birds, you’re still able to recognize them as individuals and get to know their character and personality and see their behavior. It felt like they were actual birds – whereas the budgies were too numerous, too indistinguishable, that they felt like a seed-eating machine. Also, it’s a lot easier to provide better welfare for a smaller flock of larger, more recognizable individuals. Sure, we had the disease problem with the lorikeets, but that was a boss problem, not a bird problem – if we’d had a proper vet, I’m sure we would have solved it much more easily. It was especially hard to keep the budgies safe during feedings, as with so many birds, and all smaller than the lorikeets, it was much easier for a budgie to wind up underfoot (we insisted that strollers be kept outside the aviary – but on busy days, we’d sometimes outsource budgie duty to volunteers or interns, who were a lot less assertive about enforcing that rule against pushy parents). It was hard being a budgiary keeper and NOT feel like you were constantly letting the birds down.

Perhaps as a result, but I find that when I visit other zoos, I’m able to enjoy a good lorikeet feeding aviary (when we have a Zoo Day for conferences, like AZA midyear, I’ll often take advantage and pop into one). I don’t think I’ve ever seen a budgie aviary and not felt a slight internal grimace.

ctual gas heating we had in the whole zoo). The outdoor aviary was grassy, with a gravel path forming a loop through it, lined with rope-and-post fencing to keep visitors on the path. There was a fair bit of perching, most of it lining the path and with distance and height in mind to keep the birds close to visitors.

View attachment 785631

Every day, I would mix up a batch of the nectar – a powder stirred into warm water until it was the consistency of a somewhat thin smoothie. I have a very strong sweet tooth and am addicted to sugar, but I have to admit, I found the liquid almost nauseating in its sickly-sweet smell, and I think I would have sooner drunk bleach than the mixture... which I mentioned because many of my coworkers did take a shot of it... once (you yourselves, ZooChatters, have likely fed lorikeets at a zoo before, and may not have noticed the smell. It’s not nearly so strong when it’s in a small cup, as opposed to a huge pitcher). On days when we expected to be very busy, we’d water the mixture down a bit more to make it last longer throughout the day. The nectar was supplemented each day with chopped produce, sometimes mixed into the nectar, sometimes scattered around the yard.

Lorikeet management was focused around the feedings. The aviary was locked (but visible from the outside) and only open at feeding times. When we were at the busy open season, there were three half-hour public feedings a day. When possible on busy days, we tried to have two keepers present – one to sit at the entrance vestibule, take money, and dispense the cups and explain the rules, the other to watch the inside of the aviary and monitor interactions. Visitors were, I will say, fairly well behaved in the aviary, as in I never saw anyone try to grab or harm a bird. Likewise, I never had a lorikeet try to bite a visitor. The more frequent problem we had was visitors freaking out – I was not prepared for how many people are absolutely terrified of birds and just don’t realize it until one lands on them. On some busy days, I would have to come back at the end of the day with a new pitcher to feed the lorikeets – so many visitors would suddenly panic when a bird would land on them that they’d scream and throw their cup into the gravel, from which the birds were able to get very little of it. On very busy days the nectar would be consumed by noon and the lorikeets, fat and full, would be resting on their perches – we’d have to deal with angry parents who wanted to buy nectar, even after we told them the birds were full. We’d relent and make some up anyway – only for parents to then be upset that the birds wouldn’t come to them.

View attachment 785632

At the end of the day, all unconsumed nectar was poured into big flat feeding pans on the ground, which the lorikeets would lick clean in short order. I’d assume that they got most of their moisture from their diet – both the nectar and the fruit – but water bowls were also provided.

Winters were my least favorite time to be a lorikeet keeper. True, we were closed and that meant I didn’t have to rush through my day to be ready for feedings several times a day. But in the spring, summer, and fall, they were mostly fed outside. In the winter, they were fed indoors – and that meant that I had to clean indoors. Nectar runs right through lorikeets, and each day their holding building would be covered with the whitewash of their sticky, smelly feces. Cleaning the floor was bad enough, but their feces would literally paint the stainless steel mesh that fronted their holding, and it took forever to scrub clean. All of this while surrounded by their constant chattering in the echoing little building, and it was enough to make you scream… but that only would have added to the noise.

A few months before I left that zoo, lorikeets just started… dying. At a rate of about one every few days. No symptoms, one would be healthy one day, and then be found deceased the next. No cause was known, and our boss was notoriously stingy about calling a vet, convinced in his own ability to solve all problems himself, while simultaneously furious at us for not stopping the deaths. We tried everything, and eventually took to mixing the antibiotic tetracycline into their nectar (I spent a lot of time frantically reading everything I could about lorikeet health and eventually thought that Chlamydia seemed to be the most likely cause, which led us to the tetracycline). Deaths immediately stopped – but would start again if we were to stop mixing it in. As long as they stayed on it, they were very healthy and hearty. Withdraw it, bad things happened.

My boss was keenly aware of each lorikeet loss – not only did each lorikeet cost hundreds of dollars, but if the flock dipped too low, we wouldn’t have an effective feeding aviary. For that reason, he was also unwilling to let us provide nest boxes and try to breed the birds to replenish numbers, as he was concerned that if they paired off, they wouldn’t take food from people. The whole place really was a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t place.

With the expense of lorikeets (both as individuals and in terms of feeding), it’s no surprise that many zoos, especially the smaller ones, began switching to their less-expensive alternative. Budgerigars are much, much cheaper to feed and obtain, and at my next zoo, we converted an old aviary (which itself was almost empty at the time) to a budgiary, adding a small holding building and redoing the wire. Over 500 budgies were obtained for it. The aviary was similar to the lorikeet aviary at the other zoo, but had river rock substrate instead of grass, with the idea that we would just hose it down every day. Their indoor holding building had a large, wire cage, suspended off the ground over a tarp. Each day, we’d drag that tarp outside and soak it clean, putting another tarp in its place while it dried.

The budgies were fed seed sticks on paraffin wax, which our gift shop staff churned out constantly whenever they didn’t have customers. Like the lorikeet nectar, I’m uncertain as to how much of the food actually made it to the birds, and I found an amazing number of sticks in all sorts of enclosures where they shouldn’t have been – even floating in the alligator pond (presumably people tossed them to make the gators move?). Unfortunately, all of those dropped sticks had a way of attracting other animals – and the river rocks in the aviary, it seemed, formed a perfect habitat for rats. Some of which, I suspect, developed a taste for budgies.

Given a choice between the two, I much preferred working with lorikeets. When you work with a flock of thirty birds, you’re still able to recognize them as individuals and get to know their character and personality and see their behavior. It felt like they were actual birds – whereas the budgies were too numerous, too indistinguishable, that they felt like a seed-eating machine. Also, it’s a lot easier to provide better welfare for a smaller flock of larger, more recognizable individuals. Sure, we had the disease problem with the lorikeets, but that was a boss problem, not a bird problem – if we’d had a proper vet, I’m sure we would have solved it much more easily. It was especially hard to keep the budgies safe during feedings, as with so many birds, and all smaller than the lorikeets, it was much easier for a budgie to wind up underfoot (we insisted that strollers be kept outside the aviary – but on busy days, we’d sometimes outsource budgie duty to volunteers or interns, who were a lot less assertive about enforcing that rule against pushy parents). It was hard being a budgiary keeper and NOT feel like you were constantly letting the birds down.

Perhaps as a result, but I find that when I visit other zoos, I’m able to enjoy a good lorikeet feeding aviary (when we have a Zoo Day for conferences, like AZA midyear, I’ll often take advantage and pop into one). I don’t think I’ve ever seen a budgie aviary and not felt a slight internal grimace.

For today’s post, we’ll look at two groups of parrots, inevitably tied together through common association in zoos – the rainbow lorikeet, and the budgerigar. These, of course, are the birds most often seen in zoos for use in feeding aviaries. My experience with each species comes from non-AZA zoos, having worked with each species at one (different) facility.

I worked with the lorikeets first. We called them rainbow lorikeets, because that’s how they were all defined at the time, but in the years since the species has been carved up into several species, and we had some coconuts, sunsets, etc in our flock (along with a single red lory). The flock consisted of about thirty birds, housed in a fairly spacious aviary with an attached holding building (one of the few proper indoor holdings with actual gas heating we had in the whole zoo). The outdoor aviary was grassy, with a gravel path forming a loop through it, lined with rope-and-post fencing to keep visitors on the path. There was a fair bit of perching, most of it lining the path and with distance and height in mind to keep the birds close to visitors.

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Every day, I would mix up a batch of the nectar – a powder stirred into warm water until it was the consistency of a somewhat thin smoothie. I have a very strong sweet tooth and am addicted to sugar, but I have to admit, I found the liquid almost nauseating in its sickly-sweet smell, and I think I would have sooner drunk bleach than the mixture... which I mentioned because many of my coworkers did take a shot of it... once (you yourselves, ZooChatters, have likely fed lorikeets at a zoo before, and may not have noticed the smell. It’s not nearly so strong when it’s in a small cup, as opposed to a huge pitcher). On days when we expected to be very busy, we’d water the mixture down a bit more to make it last longer throughout the day. The nectar was supplemented each day with chopped produce, sometimes mixed into the nectar, sometimes scattered around the yard.

Lorikeet management was focused around the feedings. The aviary was locked (but visible from the outside) and only open at feeding times. When we were at the busy open season, there were three half-hour public feedings a day. When possible on busy days, we tried to have two keepers present – one to sit at the entrance vestibule, take money, and dispense the cups and explain the rules, the other to watch the inside of the aviary and monitor interactions. Visitors were, I will say, fairly well behaved in the aviary, as in I never saw anyone try to grab or harm a bird. Likewise, I never had a lorikeet try to bite a visitor. The more frequent problem we had was visitors freaking out – I was not prepared for how many people are absolutely terrified of birds and just don’t realize it until one lands on them. On some busy days, I would have to come back at the end of the day with a new pitcher to feed the lorikeets – so many visitors would suddenly panic when a bird would land on them that they’d scream and throw their cup into the gravel, from which the birds were able to get very little of it. On very busy days the nectar would be consumed by noon and the lorikeets, fat and full, would be resting on their perches – we’d have to deal with angry parents who wanted to buy nectar, even after we told them the birds were full. We’d relent and make some up anyway – only for parents to then be upset that the birds wouldn’t come to them.

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At the end of the day, all unconsumed nectar was poured into big flat feeding pans on the ground, which the lorikeets would lick clean in short order. I’d assume that they got most of their moisture from their diet – both the nectar and the fruit – but water bowls were also provided.

Winters were my least favorite time to be a lorikeet keeper. True, we were closed and that meant I didn’t have to rush through my day to be ready for feedings several times a day. But in the spring, summer, and fall, they were mostly fed outside. In the winter, they were fed indoors – and that meant that I had to clean indoors. Nectar runs right through lorikeets, and each day their holding building would be covered with the whitewash of their sticky, smelly feces. Cleaning the floor was bad enough, but their feces would literally paint the stainless steel mesh that fronted their holding, and it took forever to scrub clean. All of this while surrounded by their constant chattering in the echoing little building, and it was enough to make you scream… but that only would have added to the noise.

A few months before I left that zoo, lorikeets just started… dying. At a rate of about one every few days. No symptoms, one would be healthy one day, and then be found deceased the next. No cause was known, and our boss was notoriously stingy about calling a vet, convinced in his own ability to solve all problems himself, while simultaneously furious at us for not stopping the deaths. We tried everything, and eventually took to mixing the antibiotic tetracycline into their nectar (I spent a lot of time frantically reading everything I could about lorikeet health and eventually thought that Chlamydia seemed to be the most likely cause, which led us to the tetracycline). Deaths immediately stopped – but would start again if we were to stop mixing it in. As long as they stayed on it, they were very healthy and hearty. Withdraw it, bad things happened.

My boss was keenly aware of each lorikeet loss – not only did each lorikeet cost hundreds of dollars, but if the flock dipped too low, we wouldn’t have an effective feeding aviary. For that reason, he was also unwilling to let us provide nest boxes and try to breed the birds to replenish numbers, as he was concerned that if they paired off, they wouldn’t take food from people. The whole place really was a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t place.

With the expense of lorikeets (both as individuals and in terms of feeding), it’s no surprise that many zoos, especially the smaller ones, began switching to their less-expensive alternative. Budgerigars are much, much cheaper to feed and obtain, and at my next zoo, we converted an old aviary (which itself was almost empty at the time) to a budgiary, adding a small holding building and redoing the wire. Over 500 budgies were obtained for it. The aviary was similar to the lorikeet aviary at the other zoo, but had river rock substrate instead of grass, with the idea that we would just hose it down every day. Their indoor holding building had a large, wire cage, suspended off the ground over a tarp. Each day, we’d drag that tarp outside and soak it clean, putting another tarp in its place while it dried.

The budgies were fed seed sticks on paraffin wax, which our gift shop staff churned out constantly whenever they didn’t have customers. Like the lorikeet nectar, I’m uncertain as to how much of the food actually made it to the birds, and I found an amazing number of sticks in all sorts of enclosures where they shouldn’t have been – even floating in the alligator pond (presumably people tossed them to make the gators move?). Unfortunately, all of those dropped sticks had a way of attracting other animals – and the river rocks in the aviary, it seemed, formed a perfect habitat for rats. Some of which, I suspect, developed a taste for budgies.

Given a choice between the two, I much preferred working with lorikeets. When you work with a flock of thirty birds, you’re still able to recognize them as individuals and get to know their character and personality and see their behavior. It felt like they were actual birds – whereas the budgies were too numerous, too indistinguishable, that they felt like a seed-eating machine. Also, it’s a lot easier to provide better welfare for a smaller flock of larger, more recognizable individuals. Sure, we had the disease problem with the lorikeets, but that was a boss problem, not a bird problem – if we’d had a proper vet, I’m sure we would have solved it much more easily. It was especially hard to keep the budgies safe during feedings, as with so many birds, and all smaller than the lorikeets, it was much easier for a budgie to wind up underfoot (we insisted that strollers be kept outside the aviary – but on busy days, we’d sometimes outsource budgie duty to volunteers or interns, who were a lot less assertive about enforcing that rule against pushy parents). It was hard being a budgiary keeper and NOT feel like you were constantly letting the birds down.

Perhaps as a result, but I find that when I visit other zoos, I’m able to enjoy a good lorikeet feeding aviary (when we have a Zoo Day for conferences, like AZA midyear, I’ll often take advantage and pop into one). I don’t think I’ve ever seen a budgie aviary and not felt a slight internal grimace.

Hi Aardwolf, thanks for your candid reply to the feeding of live animals, it raised the importance of having to kill animals in a quick and humane way, which is stressful to the keeper and probably not something that they would expect to have to do.
With regard to the housing of 500 budgies,I assume that it was a mix of male and females and that there was no attempt to breed them. However , I would imagine that the females would be dropping eggs all over the place.

 

[Great Argus]

I have a very strong sweet tooth and am addicted to sugar, but I have to admit, I found the liquid almost nauseating in its sickly-sweet smell, and I think I would have sooner drunk bleach than the mixture... which I mentioned because many of my coworkers did take a shot of it... once (you yourselves, ZooChatters, have likely fed lorikeets at a zoo before, and may not have noticed the smell. It’s not nearly so strong when it’s in a small cup, as opposed to a huge pitcher).

It does smell incredibly strong, and I never cared to try it either.

The more frequent problem we had was visitors freaking out – I was not prepared for how many people are absolutely terrified of birds and just don’t realize it until one lands on them.

Or the people that enter because whoever they're with coaxed them to do it, and they look terrified the entire time. Like you say so many people are ok until the bird arrives, and then they panic, drop the cup, and then get further terrified by the resulting rush of birds trying to get at the nectar... takes a lot of patience working in a feeding aviary.

For that reason, he was also unwilling to let us provide nest boxes and try to breed the birds to replenish numbers, as he was concerned that if they paired off, they wouldn’t take food from people.

They will still take food, and aren't usually too absent. However, they turn very defensive over the nest site and you better be prepared to either shield yourself or back out of the defense zone if you have to bother them. Luckily the zone isn't too large (usually about 4-6 feet in radius) but it can be a little problematic to deal with at times.

 

[Aardwolf]

@Great Argus , you're right, it certainly is possible to breed lorikeets in a feeding aviary, and some zoos do it. My boss was, shall I say, conservative - and I don't just mean that in a political sense (though he certainly was that, as many private zoo owners are). He was very suspicious of change and unwilling to do things differently, which meant that things that he was good at, he had down to an art, but things he was not good at... he tended to stay not good at. And that tended to set the tone of culture at that facility.

Today, a short little post about a short little bird. In previous posts I’ve talked about the ostrich and emu, the rhea and the cassowary. Today, we’ll take a look at a smaller relation*.

I don’t know why, but I had an inordinate amount of fondness for the elegant-crested tinamou. I think it’s the sort of bird that you are more inclined to appreciate if you know its unusual taxonomy – otherwise, it could very easily be mistaken for a brown chicken. I worked with three females at an AZA zoo. They lived in an aviary already described in this thread – it was the one shared not only with the sun conure flock, but also with the nastier of our two great curassows, as well as Orinoco geese and Guira cuckoo.

Visitors saw very little of our tinamous. Hell, I saw very little of them. Every morning, I went through the tedious task of finding them, no small feat in an enclosure with a ground level that was as busy as this one – lots of tall grasses, lots of deadfall. Usually, I didn’t actually find the tinamous per se – I’d get close to where they were hiding, and then they’d explode into motion, sprinting out of hiding, sometimes right from where my foot was about to fall. They’d dash a short distance, and then vanish again (sometimes they’d fly – just not very well or very far). When they squatted against the dusty, bare portions of the yard, raked to provide dust bathing opportunities, they seemed invisible.

As admittedly dull in color as the birds were, their eggs were something else entirely. I was on my first week taking care of them, when I was pushing back some brush, saw something on the ground, and found myself wondering why the keeper was in yesterday had left a handful of limes lying on the ground. Eventually, I realized that they weren’t limes – they were eggs, startling green in color. Obviously having three females we weren’t going to breed, so they were discarded eventually. Periodically we’d see them, though – I cleaned out one to keep in my little biofact collection.



The tinamous were fed Mazuri ratite chow, topped with diced lettuce and then with mealworms (easily one of the fastest and simplest bird diets I had to make every day, compared to the tedious mixing and chopping for, say, the parrots or the curassows). I don’t think I ever saw them eat – they were one of those species which remained in hiding until you were out of the exhibit, two doors securely closed between them and you, before they’d feel comfortable eating.

The individuals that I worked with were the first kept at that zoo, and when they eventually passed, the decision was made not to continue working with that species. Part of it was their limited visitor appeal, seeing as no one ever saw them (I suspected that intimidation by the curassow was a factor that went into their elusiveness, though I never saw the species interact. That being said, even in exhibits where they’ve only been kept with smaller birds, I often have sensed that tinamous seem elusive). I think the main reason though was concern that the climate wasn’t ideal for them. We were in an area that was pretty hot and humid, especially in the summer, whereas these birds naturally hail from the cooler, drier parts of South America. It’s interesting how it seems that it many cases (among endotherms, anyway), tropical animals seem to adjust better to cooler weather than cool-weather species due to warm weather.

This is now a species that is fairly uncommon in AZA zoos, largely driven by lack of interest (I once heard the Chair of the Struthioniformes TAG, which covers the species, admit that she herself had zero interest in tinamous – and if she couldn’t muster enthusiasm for the birds, what chance did they have with anyone else?).

*If you thought I was going to go with kiwis after this lead-up… I wish. Though they have become more common in zoos in recent years, I’ve barely encountered the species. I’ve only even see the species on exhibit at one zoo, despite having seen many exhibits. I did get a pretty fun encounter hanging out with one behind the scenes at another zoo, including some brief cuddles.

 

[birdsandbats]

My one time seeing Elegant Crested Tinamou, they were kept in an aviary where the only other ground birds were ducks, and they seems fairly obvious and showy. Maybe the curassow was a big factor.