A Zoo Man's Notebook, 2025

[Great Argus]

Animals that have had to be removed from the wild as a result of an already traumatic experience, such as an injury, often remain very shy and uncomfortable around us for their entire lives. That's definetely been my experience with bald eagles at the three facilities (two zoos, both AZA, and one raptor center) where I've worked with them. From the second they see me approach the exhibit, they get extremely nervous - and it's exacerbated by the fact that these permanently injured eagles always seem to forget that they can't fly anymore.

I'll definitely concur with this re experience with a flight impaired Golden - she got used to people and wouldn't necessarily freak out when her enclosure was entered, but she was a lot more suspicious of unusual goings-on and maintained a bigger space bubble than most of the other birds.

My baseline assumption would be that, in addition to individual personalities and the animal's background (how it was injured, where it lived before, etc) some species may be more adaptable to being captive and flightless than others? Your note about Cooper's hawk gives me this impression especially, I've noticed before that Accipiter hawks are a lot rarer in zoos and in raptor centers than their wild abundance suggests they should be.

Some species are definitely more adaptable/calmer than others - and generally lifestyle is a good indicator. The dash-and-grab accipiters are notoriously high-strung and I've generally heard they're often not particularly long-lived in captivity; goshawk seems a little more stable than the smaller species. Falcons too are typically edgier and more flighty. Buteo by contrast are normally a lot harder to faze and much calmer. Caracaras and vultures are usually relatively calm, though Turkey Vultures often tend to be fraidy cats. There are exceptions of course, and I definitely agree with Aardwolf that the right bird in the right setup with the right handler can do wonders.

 

[AndyJ08]

This may be a niche question, but @Aardwolf, why is it that “toxic” plants such as philodendrons and Dieffenbachia are commonly seen in tropical exhibits with birds and mammals alike, yet they are described as being deadly to birds and mammals? Have there ever been any recorded fatalities?

 

[Aardwolf]

@Daktari JG , strange that you mention that. I never found sloth poop to have a particular offensive smell. Honestly, I never noticed much of a smell with it. It sort of reminds me of clumped deer pellets. That being said, few animals have poop which smells exceptionally bad to me. Today's species is actually one of the exceptions, though for some reason it never seemed to bother other keepers as much as me

@AndyJ08 , toxic plants are a concern, but not something I've encountered many problems with. Even when present, the animals often avoid them, usually without too much difficulty because they tend to be unpalatable anyway. I did once have an issue with a guanaco that was living in a pen that, upon further inspection, was almost 100% nightshade, and that ended up being an issue. The species group we'll talk about today, however, is one that has a lot of toxic sensitives, which keepers must be wary off, because some of the things that are dangerous to them are things we would overlook as not being dangerous to ourselves.

As @Coelacanth18 and @Great Argus have said, there tend to be species-typical personalities (and in some species, sex-typical personalities as well), though outliers exist. For accipiters, for example, I've worked with sharp-shin, Cooper, and goshawk, and have found them to be much less tractable than Buteos - the goshawks a little more aggressive than fearful, the sharp-shins constantly escaping due to their small size and agility. But as the Cooper showed, exceptions exist. To go back to the point about native raptors being used as education ambassadors, you may see that that's becoming less common than it once was. Steve Martin (the animal trainer, not THAT Steve Martin) put out a pretty good white paper years ago basically calling on everyone to stop using native, non-releasable owls as ambassadors - we've historically seen the tendency of owls to engage in their normal stress behavior in the day - sit still and quiet and hope no one notices them - put them on gloves, and assumed that they were good ambassadors.

For our next entry - it's never a good feeling to enter a dark room when you're the first one to work in the morning, only to hear a voice from the shadows say, "I'm going to kill you". It's even worse when the voice isn't human.

Ornithologists will tell you that there's over a dozen living species of macaws, but in the experience of most zookeepers, there's only really two kinds of macaw (you could extend this to cockatoos or other groups of parrots as well). There are the ones that know that they are parrots, and behave as such - living in a social group, or at least a pair, fully-flighted, and essentially acting like feathered monkeys. And there are the ones that think that they are former pets - often flight restricted, perpetually screaming, often feather-plucked, and behaving like toddlers with emotional disorders. I've worked with a handful of both, across four Ara species - scarlet, blue and gold, green-winged, and military... as well as one hybrid and one bonus bird (more on that later).

Some of the macaws have been former pets, in one case a rescue from a confiscation, and have been ambassadors. Some have been exhibit animals, either on sticks or in enclosures. Like many of you, I disapprove of the parrot on a stick concept, though in this case, the stick option may have been better than the enclosure - the enclosure in question was just a Behlen, so no opportunities for flight, while the "sticks" at least were multiple whole trees joined by rope bridges. Still not ideal. If the Behlens had one advantage, it's that they protected birds from predators, so they could be left outside overnight, while the stick birds had to be brought inside. I often found myself working late in those days so that the stick birds could stay out later in the warm months (and, on more than one occasion, was at home at night when I suddenly remembered I'd left them out, then had to run back to the zoo to bring them in after dark).

Parrots are highly intelligent birds and need a lot of enrichment and stimulation, and the best enrichment comes from other birds. If a macaw can have a partner, that's the best option. Now that I think about it, social pairings are another advantage that the Behlens had over the sticks, because even bonded parrots can bully one another, and it's a lot easier to avoid one another in a cage, even a small one, that being chased along ropes to a potential dead end. With the exception of one scarlet, every macaw I've worked with has at least had a partner, of their species or another (and when a macaw dies, it often sets off a frantic search to find a new partner or companion ASAP - and then you hope everyone is compatible when the new bird arrives). In one such case, a scarlet and a blue-and-gold had a chick together (a Catalina), which the daughter of our zoo's owner decided to raise as an ambassador (though basically it was her pet). I took it for a few nights when it was young and she was out of town, feeding it and keeping it warm. She had visions of using it for free-flight shows - which probably ended the day it flew out an open door and into a very tall tree in our parking lot, requiring the fire department to come with a ladder truck to retrieve the bird.

The non-AZA zoos I've worked at fed their macaws parrot chow with a little fruit as a snack (produce was never fed in amounts that I thought adequate in those places, diets were very chow based and kind of bland). The AZA facilities also use parrot chow as a basis, but also fruits, vegetables, and whole large nuts in the shell, such as Brazil nuts. As a rule, the larger pieces of food you can give macaws, the better - they like working on large things, manipulating them and exercising their beaks on them, whereas a bowl of what's essentially breakfast cereal holds little to interest them. Speaking of exercising that beak, it's important to constantly provide new things for them to chew on - but make sure the wood is safe. There are few animals which have such a long list of things that toxic to them - foods, woods, fumes - as parrots seem to. It kind of amazes me that they're as common as they are as zoo animals and pets when you consider it.

Macaws are popular ambassador animals, but can be temperamental and form very uneven attachments among their keepers. Some macaws have become so attached to be that they've tried copulating with me every time I went near them. Some have tried to eat my face. As far as I can tell, there was no difference in how I acted to either bird to merit such different reactions. When a macaw does have a special love relationship with a keeper, it can be helpful for controlling that animal's behavior - I was once called into work on my day off because a cockatoo that was attached to me went up a tree, and no one else could get him down. You don't want to spoil that behavior by having it be the bad guy. Or you need to get creative. We had a scarlet macaw that needed its nails trimmed often, so we'd catch it up with a towel, which it hated. After the trim, we'd make a big show of beating/yelling at/stomping on the towel for "hurting" our friend the macaw. It sounds silly, but this always seemed to mollify the bird.

I will say, fewer things make a better argument against having pet macaws than bringing out a screaming monster of a parrot, half-plucked, horrifyingly big beak snapping in ever direction, in front of a public audience - and then putting it on a perch and letting them watch the bird slowly demolish the hard wood. I've only been bitten by a macaw once - and it was through a pair of welding gloves - and even that hurt like all hell. In my experience there's been some variation in temperament among the Ara macaws. Green-wings have struck me as the calmest, blue-and-golds the craziest.

The aforementioned "bonus" macaw was one that was in my care only shortly. A woman came by our zoo to surrender her pet bird, which is something we always dread and seldom accept, having enough behavioral issues and neurosis already (and that's just among the staff...). I was surprised, however, to see it was a species I'd never seen before, a yellow-collared macaw. After calling around, I found another zoo that had a flock of that species, so we accepted the bird and sent it cross-country to them to join their flock. I like to think we were able to give that bird a happy ending.

 

[oflory]

Don't want to clog up the thread, but just to say how very much I am enjoying it!

 

[Wisp O' Mist]

I was surprised, however, to see it was a species I'd never seen before, a yellow-collared macaw.

Fun fact about these guys: They, along with about five or so closely related species, are commonly known as mini-macaws within the aviculture community.

Mini-macaw - Wikipedia

 

[pachyderm pro]

This has been an outstanding thread so far and the first in ages to genuinely get a laugh out of me. That bit about beating up the towel in front of the macaw was hilarious. Keep up the great work!

 

[Jonathan Petersson]

This thread has been very enjoyable to read so far!

I worked with a cockatoo for a few years who was a rescue and man was it an experience. Even though his wings were clipped that little devil managed to kill any bird that flew within a foot of him. He would screech and scream any time he saw us keepers and had a deep hatred for redheads often trying to attack them with any chance he could get. At some point with his former owner he learned quite a bit of profanity which was always a lovely morning greeting. As he aged with his temper and quirks my boss at the time decided it was too much to have him around visitors and he ended up spending the rest of his days in a backstage enclosure that was fully enclosed enough, native bird populations could recover from his reign of terror.

 

[Great Argus]

I've worked with a handful of both, across four Ara species - scarlet, blue and gold, green-winged, and military... as well as one hybrid and one bonus bird (more on that later).

Surprised you haven't worked with a Hyacinth, they certainly seem to be a favorite both in and out of the AZA.

There are few animals which have such a long list of things that toxic to them - foods, woods, fumes - as parrots seem to.

I've always assumed this to be partly due to their strength and destructive nature - they are capable of and quite determined to get into things most species either can't or won't. They shred and mouth basically whatever they can reach (which especially for larger species is pretty near anything that isn't metal), which in turn readily exposes them to any potential toxins. I feel like in many cases things get learned the hard way after a parrot gets into something.

I will say, fewer things make a better argument against having pet macaws than bringing out a screaming monster of a parrot, half-plucked, horrifyingly big beak snapping in ever direction, in front of a public audience - and then putting it on a perch and letting them watch the bird slowly demolish the hard wood.

Agreed - I always appreciate demonstrations of why large parrots do not make good pets. It's basically having a deafening destructive toddler that will rip your house apart bit by bit if you don't devote a lot of time to it!

 

[Batto]

There are few animals which have such a long list of things that toxic to them - foods, woods, fumes - as parrots seem to. It kind of amazes me that they're as common as they are as zoo animals and pets when you consider it.

A possible explaination for this is the likeliness / frequency of exposure to toxins and behavioural patterns furthering toxin intake. Parrots are among if not the most popular avian pets and thus more likely to get into direct contact to potential noxa associated with humans. Furthermore, they are smart, curious, interactive/destructive and, to paraphase Sigmund Freud, very "oral" animals that like to explore things via taking them into their beaks and chewing on them - which significantly increases the chance of intoxication. Hence, due to more veterinary case reports and necropsies involving unfortunate dead parrots (including Norwegian Blues), we just know more about what is toxic to parrots than, say, kagus, grebes or pitohuis.

 

[Batto]

@Daktari JG , strange that you mention that. I never found sloth poop to have a particular offensive smell. Honestly, I never noticed much of a smell with it. It sort of reminds me of clumped deer pellets. That being said, few animals have poop which smells exceptionally bad to me. Today's species is actually one of the exceptions, though for some reason it never seemed to bother other keepers as much as me

@AndyJ08 , toxic plants are a concern, but not something I've encountered many problems with. Even when present, the animals often avoid them, usually without too much difficulty because they tend to be unpalatable anyway. I did once have an issue with a guanaco that was living in a pen that, upon further inspection, was almost 100% nightshade, and that ended up being an issue. The species group we'll talk about today, however, is one that has a lot of toxic sensitives, which keepers must be wary off, because some of the things that are dangerous to them are things we would overlook as not being dangerous to ourselves.

As @Coelacanth18 and @Great Argus have said, there tend to be species-typical personalities (and in some species, sex-typical personalities as well), though outliers exist. For accipiters, for example, I've worked with sharp-shin, Cooper, and goshawk, and have found them to be much less tractable than Buteos - the goshawks a little more aggressive than fearful, the sharp-shins constantly escaping due to their small size and agility. But as the Cooper showed, exceptions exist. To go back to the point about native raptors being used as education ambassadors, you may see that that's becoming less common than it once was. Steve Martin (the animal trainer, not THAT Steve Martin) put out a pretty good white paper years ago basically calling on everyone to stop using native, non-releasable owls as ambassadors - we've historically seen the tendency of owls to engage in their normal stress behavior in the day - sit still and quiet and hope no one notices them - put them on gloves, and assumed that they were good ambassadors.

For our next entry - it's never a good feeling to enter a dark room when you're the first one to work in the morning, only to hear a voice from the shadows say, "I'm going to kill you". It's even worse when the voice isn't human.

Ornithologists will tell you that there's over a dozen living species of macaws, but in the experience of most zookeepers, there's only really two kinds of macaw (you could extend this to cockatoos or other groups of parrots as well). There are the ones that know that they are parrots, and behave as such - living in a social group, or at least a pair, fully-flighted, and essentially acting like feathered monkeys. And there are the ones that think that they are former pets - often flight restricted, perpetually screaming, often feather-plucked, and behaving like toddlers with emotional disorders. I've worked with a handful of both, across four Ara species - scarlet, blue and gold, green-winged, and military... as well as one hybrid and one bonus bird (more on that later).

Some of the macaws have been former pets, in one case a rescue from a confiscation, and have been ambassadors. Some have been exhibit animals, either on sticks or in enclosures. Like many of you, I disapprove of the parrot on a stick concept, though in this case, the stick option may have been better than the enclosure - the enclosure in question was just a Behlen, so no opportunities for flight, while the "sticks" at least were multiple whole trees joined by rope bridges. Still not ideal. If the Behlens had one advantage, it's that they protected birds from predators, so they could be left outside overnight, while the stick birds had to be brought inside. I often found myself working late in those days so that the stick birds could stay out later in the warm months (and, on more than one occasion, was at home at night when I suddenly remembered I'd left them out, then had to run back to the zoo to bring them in after dark).

Parrots are highly intelligent birds and need a lot of enrichment and stimulation, and the best enrichment comes from other birds. If a macaw can have a partner, that's the best option. Now that I think about it, social pairings are another advantage that the Behlens had over the sticks, because even bonded parrots can bully one another, and it's a lot easier to avoid one another in a cage, even a small one, that being chased along ropes to a potential dead end. With the exception of one scarlet, every macaw I've worked with has at least had a partner, of their species or another (and when a macaw dies, it often sets off a frantic search to find a new partner or companion ASAP - and then you hope everyone is compatible when the new bird arrives). In one such case, a scarlet and a blue-and-gold had a chick together (a Catalina), which the daughter of our zoo's owner decided to raise as an ambassador (though basically it was her pet). I took it for a few nights when it was young and she was out of town, feeding it and keeping it warm. She had visions of using it for free-flight shows - which probably ended the day it flew out an open door and into a very tall tree in our parking lot, requiring the fire department to come with a ladder truck to retrieve the bird.

The non-AZA zoos I've worked at fed their macaws parrot chow with a little fruit as a snack (produce was never fed in amounts that I thought adequate in those places, diets were very chow based and kind of bland). The AZA facilities also use parrot chow as a basis, but also fruits, vegetables, and whole large nuts in the shell, such as Brazil nuts. As a rule, the larger pieces of food you can give macaws, the better - they like working on large things, manipulating them and exercising their beaks on them, whereas a bowl of what's essentially breakfast cereal holds little to interest them. Speaking of exercising that beak, it's important to constantly provide new things for them to chew on - but make sure the wood is safe. There are few animals which have such a long list of things that toxic to them - foods, woods, fumes - as parrots seem to. It kind of amazes me that they're as common as they are as zoo animals and pets when you consider it.

Macaws are popular ambassador animals, but can be temperamental and form very uneven attachments among their keepers. Some macaws have become so attached to be that they've tried copulating with me every time I went near them. Some have tried to eat my face. As far as I can tell, there was no difference in how I acted to either bird to merit such different reactions. When a macaw does have a special love relationship with a keeper, it can be helpful for controlling that animal's behavior - I was once called into work on my day off because a cockatoo that was attached to me went up a tree, and no one else could get him down. You don't want to spoil that behavior by having it be the bad guy. Or you need to get creative. We had a scarlet macaw that needed its nails trimmed often, so we'd catch it up with a towel, which it hated. After the trim, we'd make a big show of beating/yelling at/stomping on the towel for "hurting" our friend the macaw. It sounds silly, but this always seemed to mollify the bird.

I will say, fewer things make a better argument against having pet macaws than bringing out a screaming monster of a parrot, half-plucked, horrifyingly big beak snapping in ever direction, in front of a public audience - and then putting it on a perch and letting them watch the bird slowly demolish the hard wood. I've only been bitten by a macaw once - and it was through a pair of welding gloves - and even that hurt like all hell. In my experience there's been some variation in temperament among the Ara macaws. Green-wings have struck me as the calmest, blue-and-golds the craziest.

The aforementioned "bonus" macaw was one that was in my care only shortly. A woman came by our zoo to surrender her pet bird, which is something we always dread and seldom accept, having enough behavioral issues and neurosis already (and that's just among the staff...). I was surprised, however, to see it was a species I'd never seen before, a yellow-collared macaw. After calling around, I found another zoo that had a flock of that species, so we accepted the bird and sent it cross-country to them to join their flock. I like to think we were able to give that bird a happy ending.

I've had similar experiences with macaws, but would consider cockatoos the most neurotic and thus problematic species of parrots to take care of. To this day, I feel sorry for all those hand-raised pet cockatoos ending up as hyper-aggressive, self-mutilating Kasper Hauser-like nervous wrecks in parrots shelters. Living thrown-away results of human vanity and narcissm.

 

[Aardwolf]

@Great Argus , they certainly are a common species, but one I've never gotten the chance to work with. Weirdly enough, a month or so ago I stopped by the pharmacy after work, still wearing my uniform, and an employee there approached me to ask if our zoo had any hyacinth macaws for sale. He said owning one was his dream. I had to explain that a) we don't have that species and b) not how it works. Or at least not how it's supposed to work...

As to what @Batto has said, the most neurotic birds I've ever worked with have all been cockatoos. The difference between macaws and cockatoos for me, however, is that I've never worked with a "normal," emotionally and socially healthy cockatoo, whereas I have with macaws, which has made the difference more jarring with those birds. I think it would be of major benefit for a zoo to do an exhibit of umbrella cockatoos to show an appropriate environment and social group, since so few people ever actually encounter them in one.

I'm trying to skip across taxa to keep things lively, and so having done two mammals and two birds, we'll hit our first reptile.

I've worked with five species of crocodilian over the course of my career, and it probably won't surprise anyone that the species I've worked with the most is the American alligator. I've worked with this species at three facilities - two non-AZA, one AZA - with individuals ranging in size from 1 foot to 9 feet long, in both educational ambassador and exhibit animal roles.

The thing that strikes me the most about American alligators is how inherently tough they are. This is an evolutionary blessing for them. It's also something of a curse in zoos. I used to joke that the only way you could kill an alligator was a shotgun to the head - in terms of husbandry, they're virtually indestructible. I exaggerate, of course, but because alligators can survive some pretty awful conditions, seemingly in good health and without obvious behavioral problems, they can sometimes be encountered in some pretty atrocious living conditions. The fact that reptiles tend not be very expressive doesn't help, as they have fewer obvious ways of expressing their discomfort, especially to those unfamiliar with them. The fact that they are not protected under the the Animal Welfare Act doesn't help (though there has been some noise about extending the AWA's protections to ectotherms as well).

I've only ever vomited at work twice in my career. Once was when I had a stomach bug but was still forced to come to work by management, and then threw up while cleaning the tiger dens (to be fair, the entire rest of the staff had the same bug as well). The second was when I started work at one sketchy roadside facility early in my career and saw the living conditions of four juvenile American alligators. They were in a plastic trough with a piece of hog panel over the top, submerged in a liquid that probably once was water, but by the time I saw it (and, more importantly, smelled it) was a mix of feces and liquified rodent. That facility, incidentally, set my record for shortest-time-spent-at-one-zoo. It was an extreme example, but I still am amazed when I see alligators in too-small, too-plain enclosures, no or inadequate lighting if indoors, incomplete diets (i.e., just chicken pieces), and so on.

(Side note: A personal choice that I've made, based in part on experiences with American alligators - don't get a reptile with the assumption that you'll only house juveniles, and that you'll be able to pass it off somewhere else when it gets bigger. I've seen too many places get small alligators for educational animals, or animals for smaller exhibits, then send them off without too much of an inquiry as to what happens to them. There should always be a plan for full-life care. St. Augustine used to have an arrangement within AZA that they would provide youngsters, and then take them back when they got too big and provide new small alligators to take their place, but I believe that they have since discontinued this service).

A better living situation was enjoyed by two adult female gators that I worked with elsewhere with a yard attached to an exhibit building, allowing the animals to be easily moved back and forth as the weather changed (I could just leave the door open when the weather started getting cold and they would generally shift themselves in). The exhibit was still smaller than I would have liked for them, but it was acceptable, outdoors for most of the year (so natural light, varying environmental conditions and substrates), and was kept clean and well-maintained. The diet was originally a rotation of fish, chicken, and rodents, before I switched them over to Mazuri Crocodilian Chow. Each piece looks like a charcoal briquette (which is also sort of what the alligator poop looks like). It feels greasy and gritty; you look at the piece of biscuit in your hand, look at the alligator, and scoff, thinking the gator will never eat such a thing. That's what I certainly thought. The joke was on me - they actually loved the biscuits much more than the conventional prey items; the biscuits floated in the pool, the gator would chomp at it and miss, causing the biscuit to move ahead in the water, and the gator would chase after it. The only problem was that they only really liked the biscuits when they were relatively freshly tossed - if a biscuit was in the water too long (and in my experience they would only eat them in the water), they'd loose interest in it, and it would swell up to a soggy mass the size of a brick. The grease from it would then form a sheen on the pool; I usually made a point of feeding them heavily the day before pool cleanings. Feeding occasional large prey items, such as rabbits, was good for enrichment, as well as promoting the strength of the jaws (zoo-housed American alligators often have weaker jaw muscles than wild ones).


Feeding some alligators at St. Augustine. The brown nuggets in my hand are Mazuri Crocodilian chow.

We worked free contact with our alligators of all sizes, no real difficulties encountered. The ones that made me the most nervous were the ones I worked with in the five-foot range - they were the little spitfires, full of vim and vigor, who would rush you when hungry (a five-foot gator is also about the size limit of what I'd comfortably grab by myself). Bigger gators were, as a rule, more serene. Visitors were always amazed to see us in the exhibit with the gators; some would walk by as soon as they saw us in there, assuming that if we were in the exhibit, there's no way the alligators would be as well (other folks, conversely, assumed we went in to groom the big cats daily...). The most dangerous thing about a large American alligator in a zoo is how easy it is to treat it with contempt, to assume that it's just a lump that's never going to move and that you can ignore. Even a large alligator that's normally docile and still can surprise you. This was driven home to me one day when working with the two larger gators. I'd decided that the substrate around the pool was looking kind of compacted and tired, and I wanted to add several wheelbarrows of dirt and mulch. They. Did. Not. Like. The Wheelbarrow. That or they really liked it - either way, it was bad news for me. I barely got the first load out with the damn thing intact. When I came back with the second load, both were at the door of the exhibit, hissing like steam engines, trying to push down the door to get to it. After that, I only was able to do one load per day, sneaking it in and rushing to get out before they charged out of the pool and tried to seize the wheelbarrow and drag it in with them, for whatever purpose they had in mind. I've heard other folks say they've had similar experience with lawnmowers (which I have not encountered), presumably because the noise reminds the gators of a rival (alligators are the most vocal of reptiles, with vocalizations ranging from bellows - usually the bulls, but cows as well - to the little chirps of the hatchlings, which begin before they even hatch).

Alligators are surprisingly cold tolerant, and at one zoo I actually saw a few gators with their snouts sticking out of the frozen surface of their pond. All of these factors - cold-hardiness, impressive size, relatively docile nature, and easy care (to say nothing of how easy they are to acquire) - have made American alligators the most popular crocodilians in American zoos. They'll obviously always have an important role to play in native wildlife exhibits in the southeast, but it would be great if more zoos - especially those with indoor exhibits that are not restricted by zoogeographic theming - would take a risk and work with the more endangered species prioritized by the CAG. Speaking of which...


Target training an American alligator. There were two female alligators in this exhibit - one was targeted to a purple square, the other to a yellow triangle. I noticed that the animal targeted to the yellow triangle always closed her eyes when she approached the target - I wondered if the color was too bright/irritating for her. Notice the clicker under my thumb. I did this training to help get the largely sedentary alligators moving more often in order to lose weight.

Besides the Americans, I have two zoos of experience with their close relative, the Chinese alligator. Compared to Americans, Chinese have a reputation of being more pugnacious. In my experience they're much more shy. At one zoo, I could only check on the gator by watching it from well outside the exhibit; as soon as I started to put my key in the lock, it immediately went into hiding, and all I'd see of it when I went into the exhibit was the part of its tail that couldn't fit into the rock crevice that it hid in. I was able to habituate and eventually make "friends" with this gator, to the point where we were able to train for some basic behaviors, including scale trainings and even entering a trashcan so I could safely remove it from the exhibit. Brain size and intelligence are not the same thing, of course, but it amazes me how intelligent alligators and other crocodilians are, and to what an extent they can learn.


My plucky little Chinese alligator, who used to hide from me every day, posing comfortably out in view a few feet from me in his enclosure after only a few months of work

One last note on alligators. I'd be remiss if I didn't mention one of the most amazing professional development experiences any reptile keeper can home for - a chance to attend Crocodilian Biology and Captive Management at St. Augustine Alligator Farm, or, as it's usually called, Croc School. In this week long course, students study every aspect of crocodilian care in the living classroom that is St. Augustine, from sexing hatchlings to performing a necropsy to running a training project with young alligators. It was this course which really made me re-evaluate how we'd been taking care of crocodilians (and where I learned about the Mazuri chow, and much of what I know about crocodilian training and enrichment). The course even has a field trip to see gators in the wild, as well as an animal capture workshop, where teams of students work together to capture and restrain some of the biggest crocodilians in the park (my team had a 13 footer!). An amazing learning experience all around, taught by some of the most knowledgeable folks n the field!

 

[Van Beal]

it's never a good feeling to enter a dark room when you're the first one to work in the morning, only to hear a voice from the shadows say, "I'm going to kill you". It's even worse when the voice isn't human.

Half of me immediately thought "wow, this guy worked with Chucky?" when I read this initially

 

[Aardwolf]

For today’s post, we bop back to the mammals and take a look at working with cheetahs.

I had volunteer experience working with cheetahs at two facilities (both AZA) before my first paid job working with them (non-AZA). In the earlier days of my career, cheetahs were still something of a rarity in zoos – well, maybe not rare per se, but the trick to successfully breeding them was still very much being worked out. One of my earliest volunteer projects – back when I was still fairly young and had limited direct access to the animals – was spending weeks clearing out the brush from some old, long-abandoned off-exhibit pens at one zoo, which the curator hoped to turn into a cheetah breeding complex. Nothing ever came of that project, but since then, cheetah breeding has greatly picked up in zoos, to the extent that they are now increasingly common both within AZA and in the private sector.

Actually, while I was volunteering at the second AZA facility with cheetahs, one of the females there had a litter of cubs, the first ever produced in that facility’s history. We spent weeks walking around on eggshells, monitoring them through cameras, afraid to make any disturbance that would make her abandon (or harm) the cubs, and it an enormous relief and source of pride to everyone when the cubs were big enough to toddle outside of the first time.



My volunteer experience with cheetah coincided with my volunteer experience with leopard, and within the space of a few days I met both species in their BTS holding for the first time. The physical differences between these species are so obvious when you’re in very close proximity to them that you wonder how anyone could ever get them confused, besides them being spotted. While the leopards only came up not much past my knee, the cheetahs were up to my waist – and while the leopards were very stocky and muscular, the cheetahs were so slender that they looked disproportionate.

Temperament was obviously something very different about cheetahs as well, and our keepers would occasionally go in with the cheetahs, something they never would have even considered with a leopard. When I became a cheetah keeper at another facility, I too went in with ours – not regularly, but on days when they refused to shift, another keeper and I would go in with brooms to herd them in, while a third keeper waited inside to shut the door once they were in. They would hiss and spit sometimes, but I never felt threatened or unsafe when doing so.

On some weird level I can’t quite describe, I never really thought of cheetahs as carnivores, even though we of course fed them meet. They almost seemed like some sort of honorary hoofstock to me. Part of that may have been that their habitats always reminded me more of hoofstock yards than the exhibits we associate with lions and tigers (certainly more so than those of leopards or pumas). Maybe it’s because we went in with them. Maybe it’s their inherent shyness, which comes from knowing that they aren’t the top of the food chain. But thinking back, it’s probably because we housed them in proximity to hoofstock. One of the keys of getting cheetahs to breed successfully has been a recognition that they are very shy and easily stressed, including by the presence of other large carnivores. While you still see some zoos that have “cat houses” and “cat areas,” you also began to see a trend of removing cheetahs from those areas and having them in quieter, more isolated parts of the zoo, usually surrounded by hoofstock. Cheetahs (along with wolves) have been the two carnivores that have been most readily incorporated into AZA’s C2S2 model, which is mostly geared towards ungulates. This model of management has worked very well for them, and has helped drive the boom in their numbers.

No discussion of cheetahs and their nerves is complete with a mention of canine companions, and while I have never worked with those dogs, I do have a story. I was visiting a friend you worked at San Diego Zoo Safari Park (it’ll always be the Wild Animal Park to me), and she mentioned to me, as we travelled around BTS, that they frequently had celebrity guests, and were told not to make a big deal out it (i.e., ask for autographs or photos) if they saw one. Well, we’d just rounded a corner in her cart when she looked ahead, froze for a second, and then, under her breath, whispered to me, “Just act natural, don’t make a big deal out of it,” and then we continued forward. Sprawled out in the grass nearby in the field we were driving through was an ambassador cheetah, its companion dog, a keeper or two… and Brad Paisley and his family (this was 8 years or so ago, when he was really big). I guess he was on tour in San Diego and was treating his family to an outing.

A final cheetah story, and the most stressful, ironically took place on my first day as a (paid) cheetah keeper at a non-AZA facility. The keeper who was training me was showing me around the section, and I was following along, taking notes, trying to soak it all in. She showed me the cheetahs. We went and cleaned their outdoor exhibit, then went and let them out of holding into their yard. Immediately after, we left the holding building and started walking back to the zoo when she happened to glance over her shoulder and froze. When she’d let the cheetahs out into the yard, she’d forgotten to close the exhibit door first. The cheetahs were standing about ten feet outside the exhibit. More by instinct that plan, we rushed them, which had the desired impact of spooking the cheetahs back into the exhibit, and we quickly locked the door behind them. This keeper (my new supervisor) spent the next half hour swinging back and forth wildly between berating me for not telling her the door was open/distracting her (again, I was just observing that day, I hadn’t touched a single door or shift pulley) and tearfully begging me not to tell anyone else.

Which I did not… at least not until after she’d left the zoo for good and I took her place as area manager, when I’d told that story to our curator. She took the story in stride. “Well,” she told me, “it could have been worse. Years ago, before you started, she did the same thing with the tigers.”


Feeding our escape-artist (if you can call them that) cheetahs in their holding building

 

[Strathmorezoo]

For today’s post, we bop back to the mammals and take a look at working with cheetahs.

I had volunteer experience working with cheetahs at two facilities (both AZA) before my first paid job working with them (non-AZA). In the earlier days of my career, cheetahs were still something of a rarity in zoos – well, maybe not rare per se, but the trick to successfully breeding them was still very much being worked out. One of my earliest volunteer projects – back when I was still fairly young and had limited direct access to the animals – was spending weeks clearing out the brush from some old, long-abandoned off-exhibit pens at one zoo, which the curator hoped to turn into a cheetah breeding complex. Nothing ever came of that project, but since then, cheetah breeding has greatly picked up in zoos, to the extent that they are now increasingly common both within AZA and in the private sector.

Actually, while I was volunteering at the second AZA facility with cheetahs, one of the females there had a litter of cubs, the first ever produced in that facility’s history. We spent weeks walking around on eggshells, monitoring them through cameras, afraid to make any disturbance that would make her abandon (or harm) the cubs, and it an enormous relief and source of pride to everyone when the cubs were big enough to toddle outside of the first time.

View attachment 762597

My volunteer experience with cheetah coincided with my volunteer experience with leopard, and within the space of a few days I met both species in their BTS holding for the first time. The physical differences between these species are so obvious when you’re in very close proximity to them that you wonder how anyone could ever get them confused, besides them being spotted. While the leopards only came up not much past my knee, the cheetahs were up to my waist – and while the leopards were very stocky and muscular, the cheetahs were so slender that they looked disproportionate.

Temperament was obviously something very different about cheetahs as well, and our keepers would occasionally go in with the cheetahs, something they never would have even considered with a leopard. When I became a cheetah keeper at another facility, I too went in with ours – not regularly, but on days when they refused to shift, another keeper and I would go in with brooms to herd them in, while a third keeper waited inside to shut the door once they were in. They would hiss and spit sometimes, but I never felt threatened or unsafe when doing so.

On some weird level I can’t quite describe, I never really thought of cheetahs as carnivores, even though we of course fed them meet. They almost seemed like some sort of honorary hoofstock to me. Part of that may have been that their habitats always reminded me more of hoofstock yards than the exhibits we associate with lions and tigers (certainly more so than those of leopards or pumas). Maybe it’s because we went in with them. Maybe it’s their inherent shyness, which comes from knowing that they aren’t the top of the food chain. But thinking back, it’s probably because we housed them in proximity to hoofstock. One of the keys of getting cheetahs to breed successfully has been a recognition that they are very shy and easily stressed, including by the presence of other large carnivores. While you still see some zoos that have “cat houses” and “cat areas,” you also began to see a trend of removing cheetahs from those areas and having them in quieter, more isolated parts of the zoo, usually surrounded by hoofstock. Cheetahs (along with wolves) have been the two carnivores that have been most readily incorporated into AZA’s C2S2 model, which is mostly geared towards ungulates. This model of management has worked very well for them, and has helped drive the boom in their numbers.

No discussion of cheetahs and their nerves is complete with a mention of canine companions, and while I have never worked with those dogs, I do have a story. I was visiting a friend you worked at San Diego Zoo Safari Park (it’ll always be the Wild Animal Park to me), and she mentioned to me, as we travelled around BTS, that they frequently had celebrity guests, and were told not to make a big deal out it (i.e., ask for autographs or photos) if they saw one. Well, we’d just rounded a corner in her cart when she looked ahead, froze for a second, and then, under her breath, whispered to me, “Just act natural, don’t make a big deal out of it,” and then we continued forward. Sprawled out in the grass nearby in the field we were driving through was an ambassador cheetah, its companion dog, a keeper or two… and Brad Paisley and his family (this was 8 years or so ago, when he was really big). I guess he was on tour in San Diego and was treating his family to an outing.

A final cheetah story, and the most stressful, ironically took place on my first day as a (paid) cheetah keeper at a non-AZA facility. The keeper who was training me was showing me around the section, and I was following along, taking notes, trying to soak it all in. She showed me the cheetahs. We went and cleaned their outdoor exhibit, then went and let them out of holding into their yard. Immediately after, we left the holding building and started walking back to the zoo when she happened to glance over her shoulder and froze. When she’d let the cheetahs out into the yard, she’d forgotten to close the exhibit door first. The cheetahs were standing about ten feet outside the exhibit. More by instinct that plan, we rushed them, which had the desired impact of spooking the cheetahs back into the exhibit, and we quickly locked the door behind them. This keeper (my new supervisor) spent the next half hour swinging back and forth wildly between berating me for not telling her the door was open/distracting her (again, I was just observing that day, I hadn’t touched a single door or shift pulley) and tearfully begging me not to tell anyone else.

Which I did not… at least not until after she’d left the zoo for good and I took her place as area manager, when I’d told that story to our curator. She took the story in stride. “Well,” she told me, “it could have been worse. Years ago, before you started, she did the same thing with the tigers.”

View attachment 762598
Feeding our escape-artist (if you can call them that) cheetahs in their holding building

I'm surprised that the keeper who was responsible for the Cheetahs escape, was made your supervisor, infact, I'm amazed how she kept her job after allowing tigers to escape. In the UK, she would have lost her job.

 

[Van Beal]

“Well,” she told me, “it could have been worse. Years ago, before you started, she did the same thing with the tigers.”

Always nice to know that you weren't the accomplice to their largest miscue.

 

[Chlidonias]

Sprawled out in the grass nearby in the field we were driving through was an ambassador cheetah, its companion dog, a keeper or two… and Brad Paisley and his family (this was 8 years or so ago, when he was really big). I guess he was on tour in San Diego and was treating his family to an outing.

And every non-American starts googling "who is Brad Paisley?".

 

[birdsandbats]

And every non-American starts googling "who is Brad Paisley?".

Some of the Americans, too!

 

[Chlidonias]

Some of the Americans, too!

I assumed he was going to be a sportsball player. His name sounded like it belonged to someone who'd be wearing a logo'd t-shirt.

 

[Aardwolf]

@Strathmorezoo , there's a LOT of things I don't understand about how that zoo worked... or didn't work. @Chlidonias , I spent a few years as a keeper in the rural south prior to that chance meeting. I learned a lot more about country music than I ever expected, or wanted, to know.

Today, it’s go small or go home with some particularly tiny primates – the callitrichids. I’ve worked with four species of tamarin and marmoset – common marmoset and golden-headed lion tamarin in non-AZA zoos (each at two zoos), Geoffroy’s marmoset and cotton-top tamarin in one AZA zoo.

Enclosure quality for these species was all over the place. The common marmosets at one non-AZA zoo were in what was essentially a closet – and not a big closet, more like a pantry – in a home-built reptile house. The front of the exhibit was literally a glass door like you would have going out to a patio, and I could probably just have fit inside the exhibit, but it would have felt like a coffin. The callitrichids at the AZA zoo, in contrast, had large outdoor exhibits with lots of perching, shared by mixed species, with spacious off-exhibit indoor holding. Perhaps the animals I felt the worst for were the GHLTs – they had nice outdoor exhibits – but that was it. No indoor holding, and this in a part of the country that got below freezing often in the winter. So they had plenty of space in the warmer months, but spent winters huddled in their pee-drenched nest boxes (I was afraid to clean them, because I didn’t want to chase them out into the cold), huddled in front of a red bulb. I spent every night each winter terrified that we’d have a power outage overnight. The literal first decision I made when I got promoted to acting curator was to yank them inside where they could be warm. What really frustrated me about the whole situation was that the zoo’s owner thought he was so much better than the large, AZA zoo that was about a half an hour away, because *their* tamarins were in an indoor primate house, whereas his got to be in the fresh air.


A common marmoset in its broom closet.

Another word about those GHLTs – we really were not supposed to have them. All lion tamarins (golden and golden-headed) in the US belong to the Brazilian government and are supposed to be part of the SSP, kept within AZA (the later requirement might have loosed up with the concept of sustainability partners, but this was before that). However, when Gulf Breeze Zoo lost its AZA accreditation and was bought the Mogensens (owners of Virginia Safari Park), they dispersed some tamarins into non-AZA zoos. The SSP coordinator knew me and reached out more than once, and I passed the concerns up to our zoo’s owner – who basically told me bring it up one more time and you’re fired. By this point, I figured the SSP/Brazil knew where the tamarins were, and if they wanted them they’d have to deal with him directly.


The forbidden tamarins

Tamarin diets consist largely of a canned diet made by Zupreem (getting it out of the can is always a challenge, and I’ve been amused by the various tricks that different keepers I’ve met over the years have developed for getting it out. At the non-AZA zoos it was just a slice of the canned diet with a slice of orange to supplement Vitamin C. The AZA zoo combined two marmoset diets (the canned and a gel), along with produce, diced hard-boiled egg, and mealworms. Their absolute favorite food in the world, were yogurt-covered raisins. I tried using these as an enrichment treat/training tool. The challenge was that one of our older keepers, not inclined to train or enrich, would give them a large clump of these treats every day that we worked with them, spoiling their appetite and reducing their value for training (he said he did it because they always looked so angry/disappointed when they searched their bowl and didn’t find any yogurt raisins that he couldn’t stand to upset them). The primates had an unfortunate tendency to supplement their own diet with wild songbirds, which they would seize from outside the mesh, drag into the exhibit, and then dismember. Actually, I can’t say that they really seemed to eat much of them – what I was mostly remember was the look of morbid fascination of their faces as they tore the things apart. I was able to rescue a few birds, but different tamarin and marmoset species still showed a tendency to do this.

Not surprisingly, mixed smaller, flying birds with callitrichids is a no-go. At the AZA zoo, an attempt was made to introduce two Amazon parrots to the cotton-tops. What resulted was the tamarins jumping on the backs of the parrots and pummeling them, even as the birds tried flying away with the tamarins still on their backs. The parrots were removed immediately and lived out their lives in another enclosure. Interestingly, the tamarins showed no inclination to harass the similarly-sized waterfowl that lived in their exhibit; it’s like they existed on an entirely separate plane of existence (especially interesting, because I’d seen them go to the ground before in pursuit of wild songbirds which had entered the enclosure). If tamarins were the size of, say, spider monkeys, I dare say there would be no human left alive in South America, the monkeys would have pulled all of the humans apart. The cotton-tops also shared their exhibit with an agouti; the Geoffroy’s (which we didn’t have for long) lived with sloths, iguanas, red-footed tortoises, curassow, and Orinoco geese.

The Geoffroy’s both passed away not too long after we’d put them on exhibit. Their outdoor habitat was right next to a natural creek that was used as a highway for raccoons, which often climbed on top of the exhibit as they traversed the zoo at night, looking for food (despite all attempts to discourage them). Raccoon droppings often carry a parasitic roundworm, Baylisascaris (“Baylis”), which New World primates seem very susceptible to. After they passed away, no further primates were tried in that exhibit (and this might explain why you see so few outdoor callitrichid exhibits). The cotton-top tamarins were at the same zoo, but much further from the creek, and presumably not nearly as exposed. It’s a pity, because I really think that outdoor sunlight does wonders from small primates that even the best indoor lighting struggles to match; I never saw a golden lion tamarin nearly as bright or beautiful as the ones I saw outdoors at Audubon Zoo, or the formerly free-ranging ones at the National Zoo.

As small as they are, it’s easy for marmosets and tamarins to escape if you aren’t careful. At one non-AZA zoo, a careless groundskeeper with a weed-eater opened a long gash in the mesh on a common marmoset exhibit, which allowed one monkey to slip out. At the AZA zoo, there were probably three or four times a cotton-top slipped out, often when a branch landed on the mesh overhead and opened a small gap. In each case, it was usually not too hard to run the primate back in, as they really just wanted to get back to the family.


It amazes me how few photos I have of the cotton-tops I worked with - they were just so jumpy and hard to approach when we were in the exhibit that all I ever had were blurs.

During my time working with callitrichids, both common marmosets (but only at the zoo with the outdoor exhibit) and cotton-tops bred (usually twins, in one case, with triplets). Encountering baby primates during morning checks is always a weird experience – the mother climbs up the mesh to see you, and your first horrified impression is that she’s developed some sort of massive tumor overnight, before the misshapen mass reveals itself to be a baby (the heads are disproportionately large, like golf balls, whereas the tiny thin tails look like they were drawn onto the mother’s body with a pencil). In each case, older siblings would assist the mated pair in raising the youngsters, and the father took over the duty of carrying the young fairly soon after birth. Trouble came when we lost the father cotton-top and brought in a new one, who impregnated not only the female, but one of her daughters, resulting in an ongoing civil war in the troop, that was only resolved by sending out the offspring until we just had a mated pair and started fresh). (We’d also had a crop of incest babies – the triplets – at one point, caused with the female’s birth control implant failed. We named them Joffrey, Tommen, and Myrcella after the siblings from Game of Thrones. Our vet tech, who had put in the implant, was not amused).

Sharing exhibit space with callitrichids, I never got the impression that they wanted to interact in anyway, and they’d do their best to avoid us (harder for the marmosets in their broom closet). They’d take treats from our hands from outside the enclosure, but were much warier when we were in the exhibits with them. They likewise would shamelessly beg for treats from the public, and at one point we had to push back the secondary fencing to keep visitors from handing them treats (thank heaven we didn’t sell yogurt-covered raisins in the concession stand). I never had the impression that a tamarin or marmoset would make a decent pet, and am surprised that so many people seem to think that they would.

 

[Strathmorezoo]

@Strathmorezoo , there's a LOT of things I don't understand about how that zoo worked... or didn't work. @Chlidonias , I spent a few years as a keeper in the rural south prior to that chance meeting. I learned a lot more about country music than I ever expected, or wanted, to know.

Today, it’s go small or go home with some particularly tiny primates – the callitrichids. I’ve worked with four species of tamarin and marmoset – common marmoset and golden-headed lion tamarin in non-AZA zoos (each at two zoos), Geoffroy’s marmoset and cotton-top tamarin in one AZA zoo.

Enclosure quality for these species was all over the place. The common marmosets at one non-AZA zoo were in what was essentially a closet – and not a big closet, more like a pantry – in a home-built reptile house. The front of the exhibit was literally a glass door like you would have going out to a patio, and I could probably just have fit inside the exhibit, but it would have felt like a coffin. The callitrichids at the AZA zoo, in contrast, had large outdoor exhibits with lots of perching, shared by mixed species, with spacious off-exhibit indoor holding. Perhaps the animals I felt the worst for were the GHLTs – they had nice outdoor exhibits – but that was it. No indoor holding, and this in a part of the country that got below freezing often in the winter. So they had plenty of space in the warmer months, but spent winters huddled in their pee-drenched nest boxes (I was afraid to clean them, because I didn’t want to chase them out into the cold), huddled in front of a red bulb. I spent every night each winter terrified that we’d have a power outage overnight. The literal first decision I made when I got promoted to acting curator was to yank them inside where they could be warm. What really frustrated me about the whole situation was that the zoo’s owner thought he was so much better than the large, AZA zoo that was about a half an hour away, because *their* tamarins were in an indoor primate house, whereas his got to be in the fresh air.

View attachment 762754
A common marmoset in its broom closet.

Another word about those GHLTs – we really were not supposed to have them. All lion tamarins (golden and golden-headed) in the US belong to the Brazilian government and are supposed to be part of the SSP, kept within AZA (the later requirement might have loosed up with the concept of sustainability partners, but this was before that). However, when Gulf Breeze Zoo lost its AZA accreditation and was bought the Mogensens (owners of Virginia Safari Park), they dispersed some tamarins into non-AZA zoos. The SSP coordinator knew me and reached out more than once, and I passed the concerns up to our zoo’s owner – who basically told me bring it up one more time and you’re fired. By this point, I figured the SSP/Brazil knew where the tamarins were, and if they wanted them they’d have to deal with him directly.

View attachment 762755
The forbidden tamarins

Tamarin diets consist largely of a canned diet made by Zupreem (getting it out of the can is always a challenge, and I’ve been amused by the various tricks that different keepers I’ve met over the years have developed for getting it out. At the non-AZA zoos it was just a slice of the canned diet with a slice of orange to supplement Vitamin C. The AZA zoo combined two marmoset diets (the canned and a gel), along with produce, diced hard-boiled egg, and mealworms. Their absolute favorite food in the world, were yogurt-covered raisins. I tried using these as an enrichment treat/training tool. The challenge was that one of our older keepers, not inclined to train or enrich, would give them a large clump of these treats every day that we worked with them, spoiling their appetite and reducing their value for training (he said he did it because they always looked so angry/disappointed when they searched their bowl and didn’t find any yogurt raisins that he couldn’t stand to upset them). The primates had an unfortunate tendency to supplement their own diet with wild songbirds, which they would seize from outside the mesh, drag into the exhibit, and then dismember. Actually, I can’t say that they really seemed to eat much of them – what I was mostly remember was the look of morbid fascination of their faces as they tore the things apart. I was able to rescue a few birds, but different tamarin and marmoset species still showed a tendency to do this.

Not surprisingly, mixed smaller, flying birds with callitrichids is a no-go. At the AZA zoo, an attempt was made to introduce two Amazon parrots to the cotton-tops. What resulted was the tamarins jumping on the backs of the parrots and pummeling them, even as the birds tried flying away with the tamarins still on their backs. The parrots were removed immediately and lived out their lives in another enclosure. Interestingly, the tamarins showed no inclination to harass the similarly-sized waterfowl that lived in their exhibit; it’s like they existed on an entirely separate plane of existence (especially interesting, because I’d seen them go to the ground before in pursuit of wild songbirds which had entered the enclosure). If tamarins were the size of, say, spider monkeys, I dare say there would be no human left alive in South America, the monkeys would have pulled all of the humans apart. The cotton-tops also shared their exhibit with an agouti; the Geoffroy’s (which we didn’t have for long) lived with sloths, iguanas, red-footed tortoises, curassow, and Orinoco geese.

The Geoffroy’s both passed away not too long after we’d put them on exhibit. Their outdoor habitat was right next to a natural creek that was used as a highway for raccoons, which often climbed on top of the exhibit as they traversed the zoo at night, looking for food (despite all attempts to discourage them). Raccoon droppings often carry a parasitic roundworm, Baylisascaris (“Baylis”), which New World primates seem very susceptible to. After they passed away, no further primates were tried in that exhibit (and this might explain why you see so few outdoor callitrichid exhibits). The cotton-top tamarins were at the same zoo, but much further from the creek, and presumably not nearly as exposed. It’s a pity, because I really think that outdoor sunlight does wonders from small primates that even the best indoor lighting struggles to match; I never saw a golden lion tamarin nearly as bright or beautiful as the ones I saw outdoors at Audubon Zoo, or the formerly free-ranging ones at the National Zoo.

As small as they are, it’s easy for marmosets and tamarins to escape if you aren’t careful. At one non-AZA zoo, a careless groundskeeper with a weed-eater opened a long gash in the mesh on a common marmoset exhibit, which allowed one monkey to slip out. At the AZA zoo, there were probably three or four times a cotton-top slipped out, often when a branch landed on the mesh overhead and opened a small gap. In each case, it was usually not too hard to run the primate back in, as they really just wanted to get back to the family.

View attachment 762756
It amazes me how few photos I have of the cotton-tops I worked with - they were just so jumpy and hard to approach when we were in the exhibit that all I ever had were blurs.

During my time working with callitrichids, both common marmosets (but only at the zoo with the outdoor exhibit) and cotton-tops bred (usually twins, in one case, with triplets). Encountering baby primates during morning checks is always a weird experience – the mother climbs up the mesh to see you, and your first horrified impression is that she’s developed some sort of massive tumor overnight, before the misshapen mass reveals itself to be a baby (the heads are disproportionately large, like golf balls, whereas the tiny thin tails look like they were drawn onto the mother’s body with a pencil). In each case, older siblings would assist the mated pair in raising the youngsters, and the father took over the duty of carrying the young fairly soon after birth. Trouble came when we lost the father cotton-top and brought in a new one, who impregnated not only the female, but one of her daughters, resulting in an ongoing civil war in the troop, that was only resolved by sending out the offspring until we just had a mated pair and started fresh). (We’d also had a crop of incest babies – the triplets – at one point, caused with the female’s birth control implant failed. We named them Joffrey, Tommen, and Myrcella after the siblings from Game of Thrones. Our vet tech, who had put in the implant, was not amused).

Sharing exhibit space with callitrichids, I never got the impression that they wanted to interact in anyway, and they’d do their best to avoid us (harder for the marmosets in their broom closet). They’d take treats from our hands from outside the enclosure, but were much warier when we were in the exhibits with them. They likewise would shamelessly beg for treats from the public, and at one point we had to push back the secondary fencing to keep visitors from handing them treats (thank heaven we didn’t sell yogurt-covered raisins in the concession stand). I never had the impression that a tamarin or marmoset would make a decent pet, and am surprised that so many people seem to think that they would.

A very interesting post and one which I can relate to. Here at Strathmorezoo we keep two species of Tamarin, Cotton Topped and Red Bellied and two species of marmosets, Common and Geoffroy's. We have successfully bred Geoffroy’s ( 16 young) and Common ( 9 young).The Red-billed never produced any young, the Cotton Topped produced 2 young on two occasions. Unfortunately the female on both occasions suffered with infections brought on by giving birth and the young died.
All of our monkeys have heated indoor enclosures and access to large natural enclosures, including trees, that are accessible via cat flaps.They can come and go as they please, even during very cold weather. I felt very sorry for the GLHT which had no access to any heat.
We feed a diet to all our monkeys ,comprising of upto 20 different items of fruit and vegetables, plus baby porridge to which we add their daily multi vitamins. All of our monkeys engage with me,except for the Geoffroy’s. I would be happy to supply you with diet sheets if you want.