Great shot Gentle Lemur. Do the Chester giant otters vocalize much?
The ones at the LA Zoo are constantly screeching. I was told once by a colleague who had done some work in Manu National Park in Peru on macaws that when he first heard a family of giant otters screeching it was extremely scary because it sounded like someone was getting killed.
They certainly vocalise a lot - plenty of screeching, but sometimes rather more gentle cries too. There is a sign on their exhibit saying that giant otters are the noisiest species of otters, which I can easily believe.
The zoo has also put up signs saying that they are most likely to be active at 11 am , 12.30 and 3 pm (I may remembered the last two incorrectly) and I think they are fed at one or two of these times each day - but not on a regular schedule, which is a sort of enrichment. They both made a lot of noise when their 11 am fishes did not arrive
The two at the New Forest Park (brothers from the Chestnut Centre) behaved exactly the same of course. I was lucky when I found their enclosure they were waiting for their midmorning feed, it was late and they came galloping over expectantly as if I was the keeper(there was no one else about) and made lots of whining and whickering noises.
Later they disappeared indoors to sleep but then re-appeared about an hour before the next advertised p.m. feed and started cleaning up a few fish they had left lying around the pond from the previous feed. They carried these into the water and carefully washed the dirt off them before crunching them up.
