A Zoo Man's Notebook, 2025

[Aardwolf]

Thank you @Strathmorezoo - I'm no longer working with callitrichids, but I appreciate the offer, and enjoy hearing about your experiences with the species!

Of the four species of flamingos present in North American zoos, I’ve worked with the two most common species – Chileans at one non-AZA zoo, Americans at one-AZA zoo.

This was one situation in which I thought that the non-AZA facility had an advantage over the AZA, in that their birds were kept in a walk-through aviary (albeit not a very big one), whereas the AZA birds were in an open-topped exhibit. Not that it mattered in terms of flight – birds in both set ups were flight-restricted – but having birds in an aviary meant that they could be left outside 24/7 during warmer weather (and if you’re a Chilean flamingo, your definition of “warmer weather” can be pretty broad), whereas the flamingos in the open-top exhibit had to be brought in at night for predator protection. Like the aforementioned macaws, I would often stay late working on other projects so I could leave the flamingos out for longer in the summer. This, of course, resulted in several occasions in which I forgot the birds, went home, and then jumped out of bed later that night when I remembered them, and ran back to the zoo to put them up. Thankfully we never had any problems with predators.

Flamingo diets at both facilities consisted of a dry pellet chow (different brands at the different zoos) served in pans of water. These were among the few animals for which I never offered any dietary variation – no enrichment food items or anything. The chow could be tossed into their exhibit pool, but I often preferred to have it in separate bowls to reduce the contamination of the main pool. If I was building a flamingo exhibit from scratch, I’d probably have an entirely separate, smaller pool for feeding, nearby by separate from the main pool.

Flamingos are paradoxical birds to work with. On one hand, they’re overall very hardy, tough birds (especially the two species I’ve worked with, as well as greaters – less so the lesser), capable of withstanding many weather conditions and generally being in good health. On the other hand, they’re so clumsy and seemingly fragile that every day I was amazed that they didn’t all crash into a fence into a mangled, tangled heap. They also have a greater extent of neophobia (fear of new things) than almost any animal I’ve encountered. I’d frequently be walking the flamingos in for the night, then they’d all turn and balk, running back to the exhibit. After this would happen, I’d go back to the building and try to figure out what it was – a hose coiled too loosely? A shovel or rake left leaning against a wall? - that had spooked them. It would have to be corrected before the birds would go back in. Management of birds was relatively hands-off – occasional catch-ups for wing trims, injections, etc. Much like sloths, flamingos are pretty harmless, but there’s still something oddly unsettling about having one snap at you.

The most persistent health challenge for flamingos is their feet – they are very susceptible to bumblefoot, the infection of the foot pads that impacts of so many zoo birds. In their wild state, they spend much of their time on soft substrates (whereas many zoo ponds are, by nature, artificial and concrete-bottomed), and many zoos do a lot of experimenting with mats to see what type is the best for their feet. Once, in an eccentric mood, I decided to service and clean our flamingo exhibit and holding building barefooted, so I could feel what the different substrates felt like myself and identify things we might want to improve. To this day, colleagues gag when I tell them that I did that. Flamingos are… not clean, even by avian standards. That being said, their poop and leftover/spilled food all tends to be very wet, so it does clean very easily.

The flock of American flamingos at the AZA zoo was a bachelor flock, so obviously no breeding there, but the owner of the zoo where the Chileans were was determined to breed them. I sometimes think he was too determined – and above all, too impatient. He’d try a set-up for a year, then decide it wasn’t working and change things up, sometimes switching the enclosure entirely. I think that it would have been best to let the birds settle, get comfortable, and build on past successes rather than yo-yoing around so much. Comfortable birds breed better, especially when they feel safe and secure – why make yourself vulnerable sitting on a nest, investing in biologically expensive eggs, if you feel it’s likely that everything is going to get torn up in an instant? The one thing he wouldn’t try was allowing me to close the aviary to the public – it was a decent size, but the visitor walkway went right down the middle, so there weren’t many places that the birds could get much distance from the public (in a puckish mood, I was considered bringing in some hard-boiled eggs and leaving them in the exhibit overnight to see if I could trick him into thinking they laid, but decided against it. The man had no sense of humor). Ironically, our all-male flock of Americans at the AZA zoo did frequently build nests. We probably couldn’t have managed breeding there, however, what with birds being driven inside every night.

Social grouping is perhaps the key component of flamingo welfare in zoos, and at either zoo I felt like we could have doubled our flock size in the available space, and the birds would have been just as happy. It’s also the key factor for determining reproductive success in flamingo exhibits. It’s for this reason that I think flamingos – along with other colonial birds, such as penguins and puffins – make the best exhibits of any birds. There is always so much bustle and activity, so many chances to observe natural behavior, with social interactions being the best enrichment (with the exception of reproduction/rearing offspring). That, combined with how instantly recognizable they are to the public, help explains why they’re the classic entry-exhibit at so many zoos. You never have to wonder if the flamingos will be out on exhibit, or whether visitors will see them doing anything – ironically, the two most common flamingo species in zoos are more cold-tolerant than the most popularly kept penguin species, which means that there are some days when a zoo visitor may see flamingos out in winter, but the penguins are kept locked inside!

 

[Aardwolf]

Today, we’ll talk about one of the most commonly kept Australian birds in zoos – the laughing kookaburra.

I’ve worked with laughing kookaburras at four facilities – two AZA, two non-AZA. At one AZA facility there was a single kook as an off-exhibit ambassador, while at the other three zoos they were exhibit birds.

I remember picking up a kookaburra from an airport and driving it back to one AZA zoo, where another keeper joined me to uncrate it. This keeper was not one who had been very involved in the zoo world, hadn’t been to many other zoos before, and had fairly limited exposure to animals other than what we had in our collection at the time (the kook had been acquired for a new exhibit we were opening). Upon seeing the bird for the first time, he simply said, “That is the ugliest damn bird I have ever seen in my life.”

Forgetting the fact that there are a heck of a lot uglier birds out there than kooks, I have to admit that their appearance isn’t their main selling point. What they do have in their favor is a lot of charisma. Kookaburras are some of the boldest, more outgoing animals I’ve ever worked with. Whereas a lot of animals take time to adjust to new keepers, kooks will snatch food out of your hands on day one (wild kooks are known to snatch food directly from people as well). One of my favorite feeding demos was standing in our kookaburra aviary with one mouse in each hand (by this point we had acquired a second kook for breeding purposes). In synchrony, the birds would both swoop down and grab their respective mouse, then fly back to their perches – and proceed to cheerfully bludgeon the (already dead) mouse against a branch to make sure it was thoroughly dead before consuming it, to the horror and delight of visitors. I noticed that I never saw any snakes in the vicinity of our kookaburra exhibit.

That predatory attention makes kookaburras difficult to exhibit with smaller birds, or birds that you are trying to breed. When our new kookaburra exhibit opened we had them on exhibit with a pair of masked lapwings (non-breeding, brother and sister), as well as a tawny frogmouth. The frogmouth eventually got exasperated by the kooks and their commotion, and was relocated to another exhibit. The lapwings were completely ignored, though I suspect if there had been eggs or chicks, it might have been a different story.

The aforementioned commotion of the kooks is another of their more endearing traits, and kookaburras will respond in kind if you make an approximation of their call to them – a roiling, raucous, maniacal laughter that sounds like it should be coming from a comic book supervillain, not a crow-sized bird. It’s no wonder that it’s among the most evocative of bird calls, and an obligatory soundtrack for so many jungle movies, regardless of where they are set in the world! For a while I was doing playbacks of kookaburra calls as enrichment for the birds – but had to be careful not to let visitors see, otherwise, they’d all pull out their phones and try the same trick.

Kookaburra family life is rather simple and straightforward. Pairs tend to be bond well, and they breed reliably. My AZA zoo pair produced a few chicks before they got a do-not-breed recommendation. Pairs can be very defensive of their nest cavity (in the wild a tree trunk, but in a zoo even a trashcan with a hole cut in it will do) – and I have distinct memories of being jackhammered between the eyes by the male at one of the non-AZA zoos when I peeked inside the nest box foolishly. Strangely, that male came to a mysterious bad end shortly after I left the zoo – I’d still been in touch with a keeper who was working with him, who informed me that one day he came in and found that the female kookaburra had killed him, practically tearing him open. That pair had never mated, but they’d lived together for years, so I have no idea what would have provoked such a sudden burst of aggression.



The ambassador kook was early in my career and while I took care of him, I never used him as a program bird myself, being too inexperienced. One change that I’ve noted in the use of ambassador kookaburras is the movement away from having them wear jesses, like education raptors do – their legs are much smaller and weaker than those of a hawk or owl, and really shouldn’t be subject to the strain that pulling on jesses would give them.

Kookaburras are pretty tough birds capable of withstanding a wide range of temperatures – a simple heated shelter out of the cold suffices for most winter weather. Exhibit sizes have been all over the place – a rather inadequate wooden-framed cage at one non-AZA zoo, about the size of a twin mattress (no indoor component - in winter, we'd wrap the cage up with tarps), a stall made of chain-link with an adjacent mew for the ambassador kook at the AZA zoos, to more spacious aviaries at the other non-AZA and AZA facility, the largest being about 20 x 20 at the AZA. I think that the relatively sedentary nature of this species tends to fool some folks into thinking they need smaller exhibits than they actually do, and while the larger AZA exhibit was sufficient, I still cringe a bit thinking about the smallest of those exhibits, and wonder how we ever let anyone convince us that it was enough.

 

[Strathmorezoo]

You are so right about their calls being in just about every film with a jungle theme, I remember them in Tarzan films. I've also had experience with birds killing their mates in such away, both Australian species, Golden Mantled Rosella and Crimson Rosella .

 

[Van Beal]

One of my favorite feeding demos was standing in our kookaburra aviary with one mouse in each hand (by this point we had acquired a second kook for breeding purposes). In synchrony, the birds would both swoop down and grab their respective mouse, then fly back to their perches – and proceed to cheerfully bludgeon the (already dead) mouse against a branch to make sure it was thoroughly dead before consuming it, to the horror and delight of visitors.

Recently witnessed a similar feeding demo... and as someone who didn't realize just how violent kooks are, it was quite shocking, as the particular bird bludgeoned the dead mouse so hard you could hear bones breaking.
This display prompted my later question to the keeper, regarding the safety of the brush-tailed bettong living in the same space, which was thankfully greeted with the response that the bettong was too large, and not that he had simply avoided detection.

 

[Aardwolf]

Today’s post will focus on the giant tortoises, the Galapagos and the Aldabra. Their husbandry has been very similar in my experience, so I’ll treat them together. I’ve worked with both species at two zoos, one AZA and one non-AZA; in each case, the facility had both species. At the AZA facility they had exhibits on opposite ends of the zoo, at the non-AZA, they were in side-by-side pens in a tortoise barn that also included a yard for radiated tortoises (that’s important later).

The biggest challenge with working with giant tortoises is moving them. This has implications for animal welfare that aren’t always obvious at first. With smaller tortoises I’ve worked with – up to the size of leopard tortoises and smaller sulcatas – it’s possible for one keeper to pick them up and carry them without too much difficulty (though I never did quite figure out where my old hernia came from). That meant that on nice days, like those random 70 degree days in January, it was possible to run them outside for some sun and exercise, then hurry them back in when things began to cool down again. With massive island tortoises, your options to do so are very limited. When they are out for the season, they are out, so you want to make good and sure that the weather doesn’t have any surprises. The alternative is a lot of herding, pushing, and swearing to get what is essentially a living boulder to go back into its dark, less attractive holding building – except a boulder doesn’t have a mind of its own and the determination to turn back around.

This was an exceptional headache at the non-AZA zoo. Firstly, it was considerably further to the north than the AZA zoo, so it had a much longer cold season. The main problem, however, was the radiated tortoises. The owner lived in fear that someone was going to sneak in one night and steal his precious radiated tortoises. That meant that all doors to the tortoise barn had be closed and locked every night – and that included the yards to the Aldabra and Galapagos yards. So, each afternoon at closing time, even on the warmest, nicest days, I had to try to convince six Aldabras and four Galapagos – all fully grown – to stop basking in the sun and overall enjoying the warmth, the grass, and all of the other pleasures of the outside world, and trudge back into their holding building to sulk in the dark. I wouldn’t have been cooperative either. We later built a new exhibit for our ring-tailed lemurs, fully enclosed, and I tried to convince the owner to relocate the radiated to that exhibit with the lemurs (Bronx Zoo had just opened Madagascar a year or so before, which is where I’d gotten the idea) so that the radiateds would be locked and contained at night, while the giant tortoises could stay outside all night in the warmer weather, but the suggestion was denied.


Part of the Aldabra herd, starting to spill out from their indoor holding in the morning

I liked taking care of tortoises at the AZA zoo more…

Incidentally, this is the sort of situation where a combination of smart exhibit design (more attractive indoor holding, outdoor heating options) and training to encourage voluntary shifting could have made life a lot easier for all of us – tortoise and keeper alike.

On a side note, having recently seen Galapagos tortoises in the wild, I think many zoos could probably stand to put a little more innovation in tortoise habitats. Too often, we either see just a dusty pen or a grassy lawn - and usually very few individuals. I'd love to see a whole herd of tortoises sunk into a muddy pool, or sprawled out under trees. An animal is as exciting as you present it be, I feel.

For three of the four giant tortoise exhibits – both at the AZA zoo, and the Aldabras at the non-AZA – the diet was your standard zoo tortoise salad of greens and vegetables (a small amount of fruit as a treat) dusted with vitamin and mineral supplement. The exception were the non-AZA Galapagos tortoises. Their diet was almost solely grain – the same brand of grain we fed the park’s equids and giraffes. The Galapagos tortoises at that zoo all had some form of goiter, which I’d never seen at any other facility. Whether the bland, grain-based diet (supplemented with a little lettuce) was meant to address the goiter, or whether the goiter was a reflection of the diet, I never quite figured out. I assume the former, otherwise our notoriously cheap boss would not have splurged for produce for the other tortoises if grain would have been all they needed. Despite the known occurrences of scavenging and sometimes even predation by giant tortoises in the wild, we never provided ours with animal protein.


One of our Galapagos tortoises - I wish I'd taken a picture that better showed the goiter

I don’t really have too many memories of working with the giant tortoises at the AZA zoo – it was my first job out of college, but it was a temporary one, lasting only a few months, and between the new job, the new animals, and living in a new part of the country, all while learning how to adult, I was in a bit of perpetual shock. There was one memory that has stuck with me, however.

The job was as a reptile keeper in a large zoo with a big – and somewhat terrifying – collection. There were crocodiles and alligators, half a dozen species of monitor, and pretty much every venomous snake I’d ever heard of (and plenty that I hadn’t).

Another keeper started the same week that I did, and we became friends. As with most young men working in zoo reptile houses, we were a bit on the dumb and carefree side, reptile houses (particularly ones in the southern US) being environments that often manage to foster a certain spirit of recklessness and foolishness. We set up a wager – who would be the first of us to get bitten – by anything? I was a temp and he was on probation as a new keeper, and as such neither of us was working with hots at the time, but that still left a lot of bitey mouths to choose from.

For months, we watched our steps (and our fingers) as we fed crocodiles, wrangled varanids, and handled pythons. No bites.

One spring morning, we had just finished moving our herd of Galapagos tortoises out for the winter. To help them settle in, we’d put some plates of salad out for them. We were chatting as we worked, and when my friend put down a plate of salad, a grape rolled off. He absent-mindedly picked it up and, still mostly talking to me, held it out towards the nearest tortoise.

Seconds later, I heard him yelp with shock, pain, and indignation as the tortoise snapped up the grape – and caught part of his finger in the process. He lost the bet – and a fair bit of his dignity (though thankfully none of his finger).

 

[Coelacanth18]

Flamingos are… not clean, even by avian standards. That being said, their poop and leftover/spilled food all tends to be very wet, so it does clean very easily.

On a related note: I've experienced a pretty rank stench a few times passing flamingo exhibits; do you know if this is just an unavoidable side effect of keeping a flock of unhygienic water birds in a confined space, or is this an indication of poor exhibit design and/or a need for more frequent cleaning?

 

[Aardwolf]

@Coelacanth18 , I'd say it's pretty hard to do a flamingo exhibit that doesn't have a bit of an odor to it, especially if the landscaping of the zoo traps it in (I've noticed many zoos frame their flamingos with walls of dense vegetation to create a more attractive backdrop, which might heighten the smell by not allowing the exhibit space to air out). I've been considerable distances away from wild flamingo colonies and picked up their smell too, so it might just be a fact of life for that species. Good thing many birds don't have a strong sense of smell themselves!

The zebras are an interesting group of equids. They’re some of the most recognizable animals in the entire zoo, and visitors love to see them. At the same time, they’re not really “rock star” animals in their own right – they usually serve as an accompaniment to other, larger species, such as giraffe and rhino. Visitors rarely know the names of individual zebras at their zoo. I’m kind of struggling to really have many stand-out memories of zebras as a zoo visitor – truly great exhibits, zoos that are really known for the animals, etc. Sometimes I get back from visiting a zoo for the first time and realize that, without looking at my photos or ZIMS, I can't remember which species of zebra I saw while I was there. My brain just processed "stripes."

When I see zebras mentioned on this website, it’s usually on the mixed-species exhibit thread, and usually in a context of how aggressive they can be. And it’s true, zebras can be hard on their exhibit mates, especially young animals – at many zoos with mixed species of zebras, they’re housed with species of comparable size, or larger than they are. Strangely, most of my zebra experience has been working in safari-park type settings, where they shared an exhibit with a variety of deer and antelope, including many species smaller than themselves (the dangerous ungulates in this situation, the ones that killed other animals and eventually were banished, were guanaco). This was a non-breeding group of zebras, which I sure resulted in a more tranquil social dynamic than we might have had if an intact stallion had been part of the herd. Years later, I revisited this facility – now under different management – and saw that their zebras were now confined to a separate enclosure. I wonder if there had been an incident, or if new management was just more wary about zebras given their reputation and decided to play it safe.


One of our zebras, elbowing it's way into a feeding trough alongside addax, eland, and fallow deer, among the other species in the enclosure.

The zebras actually kept pretty much to themselves, and when we drove wagonloads of visitors through their enclosure on tours, they hung back. Which was just as well – the wagon rides were also a feeding experience, and we didn’t want visitors trying to feed the zebras anyway. Unlike deer and antelope, equids have top front teeth and are capable of quite a bite, and I suspect that the zebras would have claimed their share of fingers.

At another safari park where I worked (but not with the zebras there), visitors drove their own vehicles through the park, and though they were instructed not to feed the zebras, they did often, anyway. I’m amazed we didn’t have more problems. One of the safari keepers once told me that she saw a carload of visitors get out and literally dance next to a herd of zebras, shouting “What are you gonna do about it?” to the keeper when she told them to stop and get back in the car.

A better question would have been, “What are the zebras going to do about it?” The danger that they pose to exhibit-mates is equal to that which they can pose to keepers. A keeper at one zoo, where I was volunteering in college with a bachelor herd of Grevy’s zebras, told that me, historically, zebras were the animal that was responsible for the second-most zookeeper fatalities (the number one spot having always been held by elephants). I never saw any statistics to actually back it up, but I can believe it. So many new staff might take on the mindset that it’s just a pretty striped pony. Well, a pony that evolves to face the constant threat of lions and hyenas is a pony that’s going to be pretty tough, and perhaps takes on the mindset that the best defense is a good offense. One of the keepers who trained me on those zebras once forgot his own advice and accidentally found himself in an enclosure with one. It picked him up by the chest in its mouth (thankfully he was wearing thick clothing) and tossed him like a ragdoll. Thankfully he escaped more serious injury, though he retired not long after.


Grevy's zebra in holding pen

At the safari park, we were out in the field with our plains zebras all the time, and I never felt unsafe around them, even when walking fairly close. I suspect that they had so much space to get away from us that they weren’t too concerned if we were close. The only scary moment I had was trying to load one of the zebras onto a trailer. We were using baffle boards to push the zebra down a chute onto the trailer, when it spooked and turned (a zebra can turn around in as surprisingly tight space) and charged back. I happened to be in the way. From my vantage point lying flat on my back and it jumped over me, I could appreciate the thin black stripe that runs down the length of the zebra’s belly from an entirely new angle.
Like alligators, zebras are some of those animals that are inherently tough and forgiving of bad husbandry, which sometimes allows zoos to get away with less-ideal husbandry than they deserve. They aren’t 100% frost-proof – I’ve read accounts of zebras freezing to death in American zoos (decades ago – and I believe those zebras might have been straight from the wild, so perhaps not acclimated to American weather), but they can tolerate surprisingly cold temperatures, provided they had shelter to get out of the wind, some hay to bed down in. Not saying that they like it, of course – the AZA facilities where I’ve worked that have had zebras all have heated barns and temperature guidelines for when they can go outside (I’ve personally found zebras to be awkward on icy ground, which has left me with the impression that keeping them outdoors year round, as the safari park did, is tempting fate badly). Crandall described them as “Almost hardy but not completely so, there is a constant temptation to treat them as cold-resistant, usually with unhappy results.” Their feeding is also pretty simple on timothy hay and grain, with some produce in small quantities as treats.

I’ve never worked with an especially large herd of zebras (I think five at the most at any one time), and as such I’ve always been able to recognize enough distinctive traits in the stripe pattern to identify the different members of the herd. I could see it being a much greater challenge if it was a much larger herd, though of course other keepers are able to do it. They are intelligent animals and can be trained to overcome some of their natural skittishness – one zoo I worked at had trained their zebras to respond to a tambourine, coming into the barn when they heard it shake. At another, we did zebra interactions with guests, allowing visitors to feed leafeater biscuits as part of a keeper talk (zebras were fed through a wire fence, closely monitored by staff, and were told to keep their fingers clear).


A young zebra being halter-trained

 

[Aardwolf]

Today’s post will look at coatis. I’ve worked with coati at two zoos. The first was a breeding pair of South American/ring-tailed/brown coatis at a non-AZA facility (and yes, they were labeled as mountain coatis). The second was two sisters at an AZA facility. While care was very different at the two facilities, the animals themselves didn’t strike me as too distinct, and I have a feeling that if they had been switched – the brown at the AZA, the white-nosed at the non-AZA – my experiences would have been fairly similar.

The brown coatis were housed in a Behlen (corn-crib, silo) cage with wood-shaving bedding, a nest box (with a heat pad), and a few branches. Getting in and out of this exhibit might have been the most stressful part of my day. Coatis are very bold, very inquisitive animals… and also very food-motivated. As soon as they’d see me coming, they were climbing the fence at the door, reaching out with their paws. This cage did not have a keeper area, so squeezing into the exhibit with rake, shovel, food bowls, and water bucket, all while preventing the coatis are dashing out, was a major challenge every day. Sometimes I would walk along the outside of the exhibit and toss in little bits of food to try to distract them before I tried sneaking in, though this seldom worked, and they’d usually charge over as soon as they heard the key in the padlock (to be fair, it was also a fairly small cage, so it wasn’t like it was possible for them to be very far from the gate at any point.

The AZA zoo had a much more preferable coati exhibit. It was a far bit larger, with soil substrate (buried wire floor to prevent the animals from digging out) and several large pieces of deadfall to create an intricate climbing structure (note: the deadfall was starting to get old and in poor shape towards the end of my time there. As far as I could tell, the exhibit fencing had been built around the climbing structure. If you ever find yourselves planning an exhibit from scratch, keep in mind how you are going to add and remove large pieces of exhibit furniture for future renovations). There was a heated nest box. More importantly, there was not only a keeper area, but also a shift tunnel that connected to a modest (maybe 10’ x 10’ x 8’ high) holding pen. I usually worked these coatis free contact, but it was nice to have the option to lock them up when I needed to do more extensive work that had me repeatedly going in and out. One of our keepers, after receiving a sharp bite from one of the girls, decided that she always wanted to shift them into holding before servicing the exhibit, and it was good that she had that option (don’t blame her – almost every coati keeper I know has gotten bitten at least once, and they really hurt – mine wasn’t too bad, but I’ve had a few coworkers sent to the hospital. Unlike pretty much every other animal, coatis give very little warning when they bite – one minute they’re fine, the next, CHOMP. I think after I was bitten, I literally stood there looking at my hand saying, “Huh, I didn’t see that coming”). After a few unusually bad winters, we took the step of completely enclosing the holding pen (which had wooden walls for the bottom half all around, while the rest was wire) with plastic panels, then adding a space heater (caged off so the animals couldn’t touch it) to make a very toasty little winter holding area for a very low cost. It was satisfying to let the animals have more space on cold nights, rather than just sitting in the nest box.

Diet at the non-AZA zoo was a bowl of dog chow with a little produce every day, sometimes an egg or mealworms for enrichment. The diet for the AZA coatis was perhaps the most complicated diet we made every day. It consisted of three kinds of chow – dog, cat, and Mazuri insectivore – as well as fruit, vegetable, carnivore diet (ground horse), mealworms or crickets, and an egg every other day. We later cut the insectivore diet because they never seemed to eat it, and experimented with replacing the dog and cat diets with Mazuri omnivore.

Coatis are a delight to enrich using food; they are very dexterous and intelligent, and respond well to puzzle feeders. That and they love demolishing things. When we had zoo camps at the AZA facility, I loved bringing in the whole camp group for what I called “super enrichment day.” Some kids would sprinkle spice or spray perfume, others would put some of the diet in cardboard boxes, or rolled up in paper towel tubes, some would hide dabs of peanut butter or drizzle a little honey, while others would bury the hard-boiled eggs, whole and in their shell, beneath a wheelbarrow of fresh sand or soil. While the campers were hurrying back and forth, I would have the counselors forming a human shield around the coati holding, making sure that none of the kids were tempted to poke any fingers where they didn’t belong while the curious coatis watched the procession. When the kids were done, they’d march out to the front of the exhibit and we’d turn the coatis loose into the exhibit, watching to see what they went for first, like kids on Christmas morning.

Coati using one of their preferred feeders, a hanging, hollow ball swinging from a branch

In my time at the non-AZA zoo, the coatis produced young once, a pair of female offspring. One of these was removed to be hand-reared by the staff as an ambassador animal. In the end I don’t know if I would have thought that a good idea in the future – not only would I have preferred for her to be kept with her mother and sister (the father was removed from the enclosure when the young were born), but I felt like we only had a fairly small window of time when she was a usable ambassador, compared to our binturongs, in which the ambassador binturong was a good program animal for life. Which isn’t to say that I haven’t seen successful ambassador coatis. The difference is those keepers probably actually had a plan, whereas we were dumb, barely-supervised kids who were winging it.


Raising my baby "mountain" coati

That and she was an absolute handful. For the first few months we took turns taking her home and night for her bottle feedings and socialization. Raising a coati is like having a puppy – a puppy that can climb – and giving it supplements of pure caffeine a few times a day. Lots of energy, lots of desire to explore the world, and a tendency to nip. Fairly early in her youth, I was driving her home one day, with the baby nesting in a tote that I had on the passenger seat of my car. About halfway home, while going down a steep hill, she decided she didn’t want to be in the tote anymore. This was at an age where she hadn’t been very mobile until now, so I was completely caught off guard when she leapt from the tote into my lap and started trying to burrow. I’m glad no cars were in the opposite lane at that moment, or the story would’ve possible had a pretty bad ending. After that, she was crated when in the car.

I regret never having had the chance to work with a large troop of coatis – I found them to be very fun, engaging animals, and I would have very much enjoyed having an exhibit specially set up to accommodate a large troop, with adequate holding for males outside of breeding. These are some of the many animals that I feel like many zoos do, some better than others, but no one really seems to do great with. I think in the right exhibit, this is a species that could really shine.

 

[MClaeys]

Very nice to read! It’s adorable to see you care for all those animals. Nice picture of the baby coati too. I like the comparison of caring for a puppy. Such a cute little thing. It must be amazing to work as a zookeeper.

 

[Coelacanth18]

I regret never having had the chance to work with a large troop of coatis – I found them to be very fun, engaging animals, and I would have very much enjoyed having an exhibit specially set up to accommodate a large troop, with adequate holding for males outside of breeding.

There are quite a few species that I wish more zoos would or could keep in larger groups - Spotted Hyenas and Mandrills being two other examples of animals that often exist in large social groups in the wild but in the US are rarely kept more than 2-3 per zoo. I imagine this is mostly due to practical constraints - not enough animals to go around, more holding space needed, more social dynamics to monitor and worry about, etc - but it would make for very captivating and educational displays, as well as possibly better breeding results.

 

[Chlidonias]

don’t blame her – almost every coati keeper I know has gotten bitten at least once, and they really hurt – mine wasn’t too bad, but I’ve had a few coworkers sent to the hospital. Unlike pretty much every other animal, coatis give very little warning when they bite – one minute they’re fine, the next, CHOMP. I think after I was bitten, I literally stood there looking at my hand saying, “Huh, I didn’t see that coming”

Kind of a random question, as an American - if a zoo-keeper there gets bitten by something like a Coati, do they go get rabies shots? Or is that not necessary because the zoo animals "won't" have rabies?

 

[Pertinax]

There are quite a few species that I wish more zoos would or could keep in larger groups - Spotted Hyenas and Mandrills being two other examples of animals that often exist in large social groups in the wild but in the US are rarely kept more than 2-3 per zoo. I imagine this is mostly due to practical constraints - not enough animals to go around, more holding space needed, more social dynamics to monitor and worry about, etc - but it would make for very captivating and educational displays, as well as possibly better breeding results.

Agree on that. The bigger the group the better the behaviour. Its strange how Baboons such as Hamadryas or Olive/Guinea, even Geladas, are usually kept in large groups, but Mandrills far more rarely. In the UK half a dozen is a typical number, one zoo(Colchester) that did have a much larger troop of around 20+ made a fine spectacle though these days it is much reduced. Port Lympne have a larger group of Drills, around a dozen and they make a great display too.

 

[FBBird]

@Coelacanth18 , I'd say it's pretty hard to do a flamingo exhibit that doesn't have a bit of an odor to it, especially if the landscaping of the zoo traps it in (I've noticed many zoos frame their flamingos with walls of dense vegetation to create a more attractive backdrop, which might heighten the smell by not allowing the exhibit space to air out). I've been considerable distances away from wild flamingo colonies and picked up their smell too, so it might just be a fact of life for that species. Good thing many birds don't have a strong sense of smell themselves!

The zebras are an interesting group of equids. They’re some of the most recognizable animals in the entire zoo, and visitors love to see them. At the same time, they’re not really “rock star” animals in their own right – they usually serve as an accompaniment to other, larger species, such as giraffe and rhino. Visitors rarely know the names of individual zebras at their zoo. I’m kind of struggling to really have many stand-out memories of zebras as a zoo visitor – truly great exhibits, zoos that are really known for the animals, etc. Sometimes I get back from visiting a zoo for the first time and realize that, without looking at my photos or ZIMS, I can't remember which species of zebra I saw while I was there. My brain just processed "stripes."

When I see zebras mentioned on this website, it’s usually on the mixed-species exhibit thread, and usually in a context of how aggressive they can be. And it’s true, zebras can be hard on their exhibit mates, especially young animals – at many zoos with mixed species of zebras, they’re housed with species of comparable size, or larger than they are. Strangely, most of my zebra experience has been working in safari-park type settings, where they shared an exhibit with a variety of deer and antelope, including many species smaller than themselves (the dangerous ungulates in this situation, the ones that killed other animals and eventually were banished, were guanaco). This was a non-breeding group of zebras, which I sure resulted in a more tranquil social dynamic than we might have had if an intact stallion had been part of the herd. Years later, I revisited this facility – now under different management – and saw that their zebras were now confined to a separate enclosure. I wonder if there had been an incident, or if new management was just more wary about zebras given their reputation and decided to play it safe.

View attachment 764247
One of our zebras, elbowing it's way into a feeding trough alongside addax, eland, and fallow deer, among the other species in the enclosure.

The zebras actually kept pretty much to themselves, and when we drove wagonloads of visitors through their enclosure on tours, they hung back. Which was just as well – the wagon rides were also a feeding experience, and we didn’t want visitors trying to feed the zebras anyway. Unlike deer and antelope, equids have top front teeth and are capable of quite a bite, and I suspect that the zebras would have claimed their share of fingers.

At another safari park where I worked (but not with the zebras there), visitors drove their own vehicles through the park, and though they were instructed not to feed the zebras, they did often, anyway. I’m amazed we didn’t have more problems. One of the safari keepers once told me that she saw a carload of visitors get out and literally dance next to a herd of zebras, shouting “What are you gonna do about it?” to the keeper when she told them to stop and get back in the car.

A better question would have been, “What are the zebras going to do about it?” The danger that they pose to exhibit-mates is equal to that which they can pose to keepers. A keeper at one zoo, where I was volunteering in college with a bachelor herd of Grevy’s zebras, told that me, historically, zebras were the animal that was responsible for the second-most zookeeper fatalities (the number one spot having always been held by elephants). I never saw any statistics to actually back it up, but I can believe it. So many new staff might take on the mindset that it’s just a pretty striped pony. Well, a pony that evolves to face the constant threat of lions and hyenas is a pony that’s going to be pretty tough, and perhaps takes on the mindset that the best defense is a good offense. One of the keepers who trained me on those zebras once forgot his own advice and accidentally found himself in an enclosure with one. It picked him up by the chest in its mouth (thankfully he was wearing thick clothing) and tossed him like a ragdoll. Thankfully he escaped more serious injury, though he retired not long after.

View attachment 764249
Grevy's zebra in holding pen

At the safari park, we were out in the field with our plains zebras all the time, and I never felt unsafe around them, even when walking fairly close. I suspect that they had so much space to get away from us that they weren’t too concerned if we were close. The only scary moment I had was trying to load one of the zebras onto a trailer. We were using baffle boards to push the zebra down a chute onto the trailer, when it spooked and turned (a zebra can turn around in as surprisingly tight space) and charged back. I happened to be in the way. From my vantage point lying flat on my back and it jumped over me, I could appreciate the thin black stripe that runs down the length of the zebra’s belly from an entirely new angle.
Like alligators, zebras are some of those animals that are inherently tough and forgiving of bad husbandry, which sometimes allows zoos to get away with less-ideal husbandry than they deserve. They aren’t 100% frost-proof – I’ve read accounts of zebras freezing to death in American zoos (decades ago – and I believe those zebras might have been straight from the wild, so perhaps not acclimated to American weather), but they can tolerate surprisingly cold temperatures, provided they had shelter to get out of the wind, some hay to bed down in. Not saying that they like it, of course – the AZA facilities where I’ve worked that have had zebras all have heated barns and temperature guidelines for when they can go outside (I’ve personally found zebras to be awkward on icy ground, which has left me with the impression that keeping them outdoors year round, as the safari park did, is tempting fate badly). Crandall described them as “Almost hardy but not completely so, there is a constant temptation to treat them as cold-resistant, usually with unhappy results.” Their feeding is also pretty simple on timothy hay and grain, with some produce in small quantities as treats.

I’ve never worked with an especially large herd of zebras (I think five at the most at any one time), and as such I’ve always been able to recognize enough distinctive traits in the stripe pattern to identify the different members of the herd. I could see it being a much greater challenge if it was a much larger herd, though of course other keepers are able to do it. They are intelligent animals and can be trained to overcome some of their natural skittishness – one zoo I worked at had trained their zebras to respond to a tambourine, coming into the barn when they heard it shake. At another, we did zebra interactions with guests, allowing visitors to feed leafeater biscuits as part of a keeper talk (zebras were fed through a wire fence, closely monitored by staff, and were told to keep their fingers clear).

View attachment 764250
A young zebra being halter-trained

Interesting to see how much of what Crandall wrote sixty years ago, stands the test of time. Rather a lot of it still works!

 

[Aardwolf]

@Chlidonias , Many mammals in zoos are vaccinated against rabies, and at the AZA zoos where I’ve worked, keepers get the vaccine as well, along with annual titer checks to make sure that they still have sufficient immunity. That being said, for some species the vaccine isn’t effective, skunks being an example that jumps readily to mind. Getting bitten should require a follow up booster, though (which I didn’t get after my bite at the non-AZA zoo, but my bitten colleague at the AZA zoo did receive). There’s a tremendous amount of variation also between the states on how to treat rabies. In some US states, for example, skunks are a very popular ambassador animal, in zoos as well as nature centers. In others, their use in this role is forbidden due to rabies risk.

@Coelacanth18 and @Pertinax I’ve never gotten this really confirmed, but I suspect another reason that zoos don’t maintain larger social groups of some species is the premise of the SSP. In the wild, relatively few males of many species mate, whereas a few males dominant harems of many females (and, in fact, there’s higher mortality of males in the wild, which contributes to this). In zoos, however, you want to maximize the genetic diversity of the population, which means allowing more males to mate, which means keeping a more even sex ratio so more males can breed. It’s a lot easier to control that by managing the size of the social groups to limit options. I’ve never heard that explicitly spelled out, but I believe it’s a contributing factor, in addition to what you’ve mentioned about space, cost, social dynamics, etc.

@FBBird It really fascinates me sometimes to think that, while the zoos have changed, the animals themselves have not. A lion that I see in the zoo today is virtually the same as a lion that would have been in the London Zoo in the 1800s… or the Roman coliseum. The facilities change, our understanding of behavior and husbandry changes, but the animals have a continuity of their own.

I’ve heard it said that anyone who thinks that the concept of a feathered dinosaur isn’t scary has never had to fight an ostrich. Accurate. Not that I go around picking fights, but there are few animals more intimidating than a cock ostrich that’s determined to put you into the ground. There’s a reason that you most often see females in zoos – the birds are easily enough obtained from commercial ostrich farms that zoos don’t need to deal with aggressive males. I’ve never been a keeper for a male ostrich myself, but there were some at a safari park where I worked, and they were monsters. I was out collecting branches to use for perching exhibits once when one rushed me, and I couldn’t get to the door of the pickup truck I’d driven out there. I spent half an hour lying flat on my back under the truck, waiting for the bird to go away. Every time I tried to scoot out on one side to get into the truck, the bird would race around. Thankfully, it eventually got bored and wandered off… but I still waited down there for a few minutes to be sure.

Females, on the other hand, are generally very easy going, kind of goofy to be honest, with their curiosity making them some of the more exasperating animals to work with (especially because females are generally worked free-contact). They’ll follow you around, get in the way, and constantly pull things out of your wheelbarrow to investigate. Among keepers, ostriches are notorious (perhaps a little unfairly) for their lack of intelligence. “An ostrich has three brain cells,” a keeper who trained me when I was just entering the field told me, “one for inhaling, one for exhaling, and one for everything else.” I think that perceived stupidity, like many animal traits (i.e., the slowness of sloths) is sometimes exaggerated, which can put a keeper in the embarrassing position of being outsmarted by an ostrich if they aren’t careful.



Ostriches (along with rhea and emu) are frequently found in safari park settings, where they take food from visitors. Though they really have zero ill intent, the rather sharp, intense peck-and-swallow nature of an ostrich taking food tends to really startle people, which, in my experience giving tours, often leads to people screaming, throwing their grain buckets in the air, and generally creating chaos.

We think of ostriches as birds of the plains and deserts – and they are. I did work with one unique ostrich who decided that she wanted to be a duck. She would wade into the pool of her exhibit until all of her was submerged except her head and maybe a foot or so of her neck, and then walk back and forth. This behavior occurred fairly often, and we called her the Loch Ness ostrich. The pool hadn’t been installed in that exhibit with ostrich swimming in mind, which just goes to show that animals seldom behave in quite the way you think they might.

Though they are birds, ostriches are basically honorary hoofstock and are often managed as such. They are one of the lowest maintenance animals I’ve ever worked with – easy to feed, easy to clean up after, easy to enrich (as they are very easily amused). Like zebras, ostriches are often treated under the assumption that they are more cold tolerant than they really are, and their feathers don’t offer great insulation. They really do benefit from shelter and supplemental heat in the winter, even if many places do keep them outside year round.



In my carefree younger days, I tried riding a female ostrich once at a non-AZA facility. Getting on was easy. Staying on? Less so. We made it about six paces before she shrugged me off, and I took that as a sign to not try again.

Ostriches are seldom exhibits alone, and mix well with a wide variety of species; being flightless, they’re really the only bird that I don’t mind seeing in large African savannah exhibits. Their inquisitive nature can make them slightly annoying to exhibit mates, but they generally get along with most animals, including species that have reputations for being more problematic, such as zebras. Ostriches in mixed exhibits benefit from having a creep feeder – a feeder with a physical barrier that allows some animals access to a food source while excluding larger animals. In the case of ostriches, their long, slender necks can allow them to reach through bars to get food that antelope, zebra, and rhino wouldn’t be able to access. Ostriches can be fed of commercial ratite pellets, as well as some produce – they are highly omnivorous (though not as much as legend suggests) and will take readily to food enrichment.

Many zoos maintain all female flocks, but in these cases sometimes a female will undergo a hormonal change in which she begins to act like a male, even darkening to take on the male’s plumage (settle down, Jeff Goldblum, it’s not an actual sex change, life did not find a way). Females will continue to drop eggs even without a male present. These eggs are often collected by keepers and either used for enrichment (I’ve made some cool feeders using the shells), blown out and sold in the gift shop, or kept by staff as souvenirs (my egg shelf right now has ostrich, emu, rhea, and king penguin – always keeping my eye out for cassowary!). I knew one zookeeper who once spent hours hard-boiling an ostrich egg, then cut it into slices for sandwiches (one egg is the equivalent of 24 chicken eggs). I’ve only ever had the eggs scrambled, and can’t say I cared for the flavor too much.

Which brings me to a final anecdote…

At one non-AZA zoo, there was an… accident, and a keeper accidentally ran over an ostrich. I was in my poor starving zookeeper making minimum wage in an expensive area phase, so groceries were a bit tight back then. So I loaded up on ostrich meat and took a big bag home. I’m not saying I cooked it completely correctly, but it turned out alright, being much closer to steak than chicken or poultry. It is the only time in career in which I’ve eaten a zoo animal that I previously was the keeper for.

 

[Aardwolf]

Today, we look at the swans. I’ve worked with many of the swan species (trumpeter, tundra, mute, and black-necked), as well as that pseudo-swan, the coscoroba (really an overgrown whistling duck). Husbandry of most species is basically the same.

The one outlier among the swans (and incidentally perhaps my favorite) is the black-necked swan, which is also the species that I have the most familiarity with, having worked with the longest and bred the most. All Anseriformes are water birds, but I like to think that some are waterier than others. The further back a bird’s legs are on its body, the faster of a swimmer it usually is – which also translates to that bird being clumsier and more awkward on land. Black-necked swans on land are somewhat pitiful, but in the water, man are they something else. They remind me of steamboats, the way they power through the water (not coincidentally, that name is also used for a genus of large ducks, also from southern South America), and then they’re in a hurry, like when they see you coming to the feeder, they can churn water like you wouldn’t believe, making their endearing, whistling call the entire time.

Perhaps my favorite thing about the black-necks, though, is when they breed. I love it when the animals reproduce – not only for population management, or as a sign of their contentment, but for behavioral purposes. When the pen (female swan) is sitting on her nest, with the cob (male) patrolling nearby, looking out for danger), that’s a solid month when the lives of those birds is virtually the same as it would be for swans in the wild. Then, when the cygnets hatch and the parents care for them, it takes up so much of their time and mental energy that their lives are again very similar to wild swans. For many species, raising offspring is simply the best enrichment (which comes into play when you consider the American-European divide on contracepting animals or allowing them to breed and euthanizing surplus individuals).

What makes breeding black-necked swans so fun, however, is watching the cygnets ride on the backs of their parents as they paddle around. Mom or dad will come cruising along the creek, one of their wings will shift slightly, and you’ll see a cygnet or two, peering up curiously at you, a little white blob with bright black eyes. In cases in which swans are kept on a large body of water, it’s imperative that the cygnets be caught up and pinioned on their first day, because after that you’ll never have a chance to catch them up for regularly-scheduled wing trims (in cases when birds are pinioned, you always want to do it at about a day or two old – the nests were watched closely so the vet would be ready as soon as they hatched).


Black-necked cygnet, along for the ride

Swans are basically fed commercial waterfowl chow, but can be supplemented with some greens. I’ve had colleagues who have sworn by the benefits of hydroponically grown foddering for their birds, but I’ve never tried it. A challenge of feeding swans is providing them with their food while keeping the riffraff – mallards, Canada geese – out. I’ve usually fed them with a metal feeder hanging from a post at the edge of deep water, such as on the bank of a creek. I was able to adjust the height of the feeder so it would be out of the reach of smaller birds, but still allow the swans access.

Swans have a reputation for being aggressive, but I have to admit, I never found any of the species I’ve worked with to be so. The black-necks could be a bit fussy around their nest, but I never thought twice about going to check on them, sometimes even pushing a female off so I could take a peek at how things were progressing. Even the mute swans, which have a reputation for being utterly savage, never showed any aggression, either to me or to any of the other waterfowl that they cohabited with (they’d often waddle freely among the visitors, searching for dropped food). I’ve mentioned this in other threads, but in my experience aggression among bird species is often most pronounced when you have two species that look like one another (i.e., you can house a purple turaco species with a green turaco species more easily than you can two purples together, or two greens together). I’m sure if I tried putting a pair of trumpeter swans and a pair of tundra swans on the same pond, I’d have some trouble. The trumpeters never seemed to regard the Canada geese as competitors or rivals, though – maybe they were just too dissimilar in appearance to trigger a territorial response?

My favorite swan (individual) that I ever worked with was far from aggressive. We’d recently obtained a non-releasable tundra swan and, looking for a suitable companion, found a captive-bred female from another zoo, and brought her in. As sometimes happens in cases like this, the original swan proceeded to, inconveniently, die, leaving us again with a single female. Unlike the nervous, twitchy wild bird, however, this tundra was a people bird – so much so that she was constantly underfoot. She’d meet us at the gate every morning that follow up around, chattering constantly. If you turned around, you’d walk right into her. If you were too slow walking, she’d get between your legs and you’d trip on her. We called her Priscilla, a name that seemed to match her fussy attitude.


Priscilla, queen of the zoo

One day, we were sheering some alpacas, which necessitated us all kneeling on the ground (so, at swan level) and Priscilla couldn’t wait to help. She was in all our faces for the entire first alpaca, poking her beak into our cheeks, vocalizing constantly. Finally, in exasperation, I stood up, picked her up, gave her an enormous hug, and kissed her on the forehead. “There, is that what you want?” I said louder and more irritably than I intended, before putting her back down. She looked at me for a moment, then waddled off, and didn’t come near me for a week. It was like I offended her deeply. After that week, she was her usual self and wanted to be best friends again.

The only swans that we kept in a regular zoo enclosure were the non-swans, the coscorobas, which alternatively lived in exhibits by themselves, with flamingos, and with Patagonian cavies, over the years. I really wanted to breed them, but we never had luck with them. At one point we were down to a lone male, and I was trying to find a social situation or her, after the SSP coordinator was unsuccessful. I checked ZIMS and saw that there was a zoo (also AZA) with a single female. I asked if we could work something out, either send us the female or accept our male, so we could form a breeding pair. The curator declined, mumbling something about not wishing to mess up the dynamics of an attractive mixed species exhibit they had. I was pretty mad, and may have said something to the effect of that being the sort of mentality which was leading a lot of SSPs to go under (and seriously, it was a coscoroba – would any of the visitors have cared if they didn’t have it in that mixed exhibit, at least for a while?). I still have a grudge against that curator for his short-sightedness. With the blessing of the SSP, I eventually sent our male to a non-AZA facility – where he did breed. Hopefully some of those cygnets trickle back into AZA at some point.


Coscoroba

As a last note, I’ll just talk about trumpeter swans for a second. We grumble a lot about the things that don’t go well in zoos. The trumpeter swan SSP, however, in my opinion is one of those things that has gone well – very well. Under the leadership of the SSP coordinator, and in partnership with the Trumpeter Swan Society and local DNRs, zoos have been able to reintroduce zoo-bred swans back into the wild for several years, first in Iowa, now in Oregon. They’ve also got an outstanding education program and are crushing it with outreach. It really is, in my opinion, one of the best examples of zoo conservation forming coalitions with outside partners and making an enormous positive difference.

 

[TeaLovingDave]

as well as that pseudo-swan, the coscoroba (really an overgrown whistling duck)

That's a taxonomic position I've never heard for them - last I heard, they were either a) sister to the Cape Barren Goose or b) sister to a clade containing all swans and geese with the exclusion of CBG.

Memory playing tricks on you, or another paper I need to root out sometime?

 

[Aardwolf]

@TeaLovingDave, that’s so interesting, I’d never heard the Cereopsis connection before, though I can see it (it looks like that paper was published 2014, which is after I worked with the species, so I wasn’t following news about them so closely). The taxonomy I’d always heard was that they were closest to Dendrocygna. Well, that’s waterfowl taxonomy for you. If you don’t like it or agree with it… wait thirty minutes and someone will publish something else.

Today’s post is about one of my absolute favorite groups of animals, the Clan of the Komodo, the monitor lizards. I’ve worked with a crazy number of varanid species in my career – Storr’s monitor, clouded monitor (or Bengal – the taxonomy was a little unclear back then), Asian water monitor, ridge-tailed monitor, perentie, Gray’s monitor, sand monitor, rough-necked monitor, black tree monitor, white-throated monitor, tri-colored monitor, and, my personal favorite, crocodile monitor. Most of these were at one large AZA facility, with the majority of the rest at a second. The only varanids I worked with outside of AZA were the Asian water monitor at one zoo, and the ridge-tails, which were my personal pets (though I did at one point temporarily put them on exhibit at that non-AZA zoo to fill a window, but I was glad to have them back home again afterwards).


One of my pet ackies, looking expectedly up for a treat

Now, you may notice that there’s one very prominent monitor that is not on that list. To my chagrin, I never got to work with Komodos. That’s not entirely by accident – most of my monitor experience comes from one AZA facility which had an enormous monitor collection, but didn’t have Komodos. The curator wanted Komodos badly, but no zoo was willing to send some to him unless he was willing to share some of his rarities, which he refused to, so we were at a bit of a stalemate. It’s crazy how much interpersonal politics/dynamics like that influence zoo collections, sometimes for good, sometimes for ill.

Years ago, I cooked up a theory that the Varanidae as a family show convergent evolution with the Carnivora, especially the Feliformia. The small, active, burrowing dwarf monitors are analogs for the mongooses. The arboreal, fruit-eating Gray’s monitor is sort of like a binturong. The heavy, ambush-hunting Komodo is like a tiger. The sleek, arboreal, agile crocodile monitor is like a clouded leopard. And so on. I’ve often felt that the monitors are more mammal-like than any other lizards.

It’s commonly believed that the cheetah is the fasted land animal, but that’s nonsense. In reality, the fastest is a monitor lizard which sees that you have food. It’s like watching a comet shooting towards you, barely touching the ground, the tail and body trailing behind the gaping mouth. You have to think (and move) fast when feeding monitors, especially if you have more than one in the exhibit (the white-throated monitors were in a group of five in a room-sized enclosure, so they took a lot of work to keep track of when feeding). A pair of good snake tongs is essential here, not just to offer the rat while keeping your hands out of danger, but for pushing back encroaching lizards. Obesity is a major health risk with monitors, as they really do not have an off-switch when it comes to their appetite (this is especially true in zoos where the diet tends to be more rodent-heavy, especially for species that would have more diverse, less-fatty prey in the wild). On the plus side, they are very easy to exercise by making them chase food.

For a monitor not to be hungry is a very unusual situation, and often sign of illness. Our biggest white-throat monitor went off feed, so I was assisting a (very eccentric) senior keeper in feeding her. We’d push the rat down her throat, she’d hack it back up, we’d repeat. Suddenly, the senior keeper asked if I had my camera at work that day (this was before cell phone cameras were a thing). As it happened, I did. He asked me to grab it, as he had something he wanted to try. I thought he was going to show me some secret feeding technique, and I was eager to learn, so I went and got the camera. Instead, he shoved the rat into the monitor’s mouth, clamping her jaws shut on it. Then, he bit the other half of the rat himself – that rat which was, but now, thoroughly drenched in varanid saliva – and, through gritted teeth, shouted for me to take the picture, while he pretended to have a tug-of-war with the lizard.


Keeper having a tug-of-war with a monitor. The picture on the mesh above the monitor's head was a photo of the mangled hand of the curator at a different zoo, bitten by a croc monitor, which was posted in our building as a warning to be careful... and, I suspect, to mock the guy

Except for venomous snakes, monitors, in my mind, pose the greatest safety risk to keepers of any reptile. Sure, a big croc can mess you up, but they are largely sluggish animals, tend to stay close to the water, and at least only have two sets of weaponry – the mouth and the tail. I’ve never actually met a keeper who’s suffered a significant injury from a crocodilian. Monitors, on the other hand, are lightning fast, very active, and have wicked sharp claws; even when I’ve grabbed the head and tail, I’ve still been raked by claws. They can also climb and jump, including dropping down on you from above. The lone tri-color monitor I worked with had the distinction of putting three keepers in the hospital; she’d rest on a ledge above the door to her holding area, then drop down on unsuspecting keepers as they entered. I lived in absolute terror of her, though strangely enough, she never showed the slightest aggression to me. Still, I don’t know if I know a single keeper who has worked with monitors for very long without getting something to show for it. At one conference I went to early in my career, all the keepers and curators were whispering about one curator who had just arrived, his first appearance since having his hand mangled by a female croc monitor.

Many of the monitors were kept off exhibit, some of them in enclosures that I know recognize were way too small and sterile for such active, intelligent animals (there’s a regrettable tendency for reptile curators in zoos to become hoarders – at many zoos I’ve been too, only about a tenth of the herp collection has been on public display, though this trend has been changing for the better). Some were kept off exhibit to participate in studies, including those on varanid cognition. Others were kept off for security reasons. I asked the curator once why we didn’t put our Gray’s monitors (a tremendous rarity back in those days, and one which other zoo professionals would visit us specifically to see) on exhibit – we had plenty of options. He said he was afraid to let the public know we had them, or they might steal them. It was a silly argument, I thought – anyone who would actually want to steal them probably already knew we had them, whereas to the general public they’d just be another big lizard. A fruit-eating varanid is a concept which I find fascinating - it’s as unique as a bamboo-eating bear.


Gray's monitor in holding. Read Walter Auffenberg's book for more on this fascinating species!

I feel that monitors would benefit from outdoor exhibits more than most other reptiles, but I’ve only worked with the taxa outdoors twice. Once was with the perenties at one zoo (compared to many other varanids, perenties have struck me as kind of sluggish and dull – one coworker referred to them (pardon any offense) as the cheerleaders of varanids, pretty but not especially bright). The other was a pair of crocodile monitors at one zoo. The croc monitors normally lived inside the reptile house, but a primate/small carnivore cage had recently been vacated, and the decision was made to put them outside for the summer. The male promptly climbed up the tallest branch in the exhibit, fell asleep in the sun, and, apart from meals, didn’t budge for days at a time. The female, however, proved to be a challenge. She developed a weird habit of hanging from the mesh, her head through one opening, her outstretched front feet on an opening on either side, her body and tailing hanging down; it looked like she was hanging from a cross. It didn’t take her too long, however, to realize that if her head fit through, the rest of her would follow, and she soon began to escape. Repeatedly. Each time, she had to be run down by a dozen keepers, and when brought to bay would face them fiercely, lunging, lashing with her whip-like tail, and fencing with the snare pool before she’d finally be caught. After the third time, the decision was made to return the monitors to the reptile house.

As I mentioned early on, crocodile monitors hold a special place for me as my favorite varanids, both to see in zoos and to work with. I don’t know if I’ve ever met a reptile in which there is such behavioral dimorphism between the sexes. The females tend to be sassy spitfires, ready to take on the world; it was a female that repeatedly escaped the exhibit, and a female which mauled the curator I mentioned at the conference. The males, on the other hand – much larger, and very striking with their bulbous, Roman snouts – tend to be like big, serene dogs, sometimes borderline affectionate. And it’s lucky for us that they’re so chill, because they have the potential to do a lot of harm. At one zoo, we were bringing a big male croc monitor that had just completed quarantine from the hospital to the reptile house. Getting from one to the other, especially when we were open on a busy day, was most easily done by driving outside the zoo, on a stretch of highway. A keeper went over, put the monitor in a trash can, put the can in his car, and drove to the reptile house. The rest of us were at the reptile house when, half an hour later, we realized that our colleague hadn’t arrived yet (the drive should have taken ten minutes on a bad day). We waited. We called his cellphone. Nothing. We were about to launch a search party when the gate opened and, very, very, very slowly, the keeper pulled in. He was sitting bolt upright in his seat, hands white on the wheel, eyes bulging and unblinking. Sprawled across his dashboard was the croc monitor, having wiggled out of the can and coming up to see him. No wonder he was too scared to go more than half a mile an hour.

The croc monitor lived behind the scenes, and he was a joy to work with. When I’d do that section of the building, I’d unlock his cage and let him loose while I worked. Sometimes, I’d feel a tug on my pant leg, and the next thing I knew he’d be crawling up my back, draped across my shoulders, forked tongue flickering in every direction. When I’d hose him down, his leopard-like patterning of gold on green shone brilliantly, and he was the most beautiful animal in the zoo.

 

[Lafone]

Really interesting thread and as just a visitor the insights on what goes on to look after the animals are enjoyable as well as informative. And well written!

It’s also a great insight (as you see in other threads from people here who work with exotic animals or own zoos) into the zoo keeping job being a passion as well as an occupation.

 

[Strathmorezoo]

@TeaLovingDave, that’s so interesting, I’d never heard the Cereopsis connection before, though I can see it (it looks like that paper was published 2014, which is after I worked with the species, so I wasn’t following news about them so closely). The taxonomy I’d always heard was that they were closest to Dendrocygna. Well, that’s waterfowl taxonomy for you. If you don’t like it or agree with it… wait thirty minutes and someone will publish something else.

Today’s post is about one of my absolute favorite groups of animals, the Clan of the Komodo, the monitor lizards. I’ve worked with a crazy number of varanid species in my career – Storr’s monitor, clouded monitor (or Bengal – the taxonomy was a little unclear back then), Asian water monitor, ridge-tailed monitor, perentie, Gray’s monitor, sand monitor, rough-necked monitor, black tree monitor, white-throated monitor, tri-colored monitor, and, my personal favorite, crocodile monitor. Most of these were at one large AZA facility, with the majority of the rest at a second. The only varanids I worked with outside of AZA were the Asian water monitor at one zoo, and the ridge-tails, which were my personal pets (though I did at one point temporarily put them on exhibit at that non-AZA zoo to fill a window, but I was glad to have them back home again afterwards).

View attachment 765809
One of my pet ackies, looking expectedly up for a treat

Now, you may notice that there’s one very prominent monitor that is not on that list. To my chagrin, I never got to work with Komodos. That’s not entirely by accident – most of my monitor experience comes from one AZA facility which had an enormous monitor collection, but didn’t have Komodos. The curator wanted Komodos badly, but no zoo was willing to send some to him unless he was willing to share some of his rarities, which he refused to, so we were at a bit of a stalemate. It’s crazy how much interpersonal politics/dynamics like that influence zoo collections, sometimes for good, sometimes for ill.

Years ago, I cooked up a theory that the Varanidae as a family show convergent evolution with the Carnivora, especially the Feliformia. The small, active, burrowing dwarf monitors are analogs for the mongooses. The arboreal, fruit-eating Gray’s monitor is sort of like a binturong. The heavy, ambush-hunting Komodo is like a tiger. The sleek, arboreal, agile crocodile monitor is like a clouded leopard. And so on. I’ve often felt that the monitors are more mammal-like than any other lizards.

It’s commonly believed that the cheetah is the fasted land animal, but that’s nonsense. In reality, the fastest is a monitor lizard which sees that you have food. It’s like watching a comet shooting towards you, barely touching the ground, the tail and body trailing behind the gaping mouth. You have to think (and move) fast when feeding monitors, especially if you have more than one in the exhibit (the white-throated monitors were in a group of five in a room-sized enclosure, so they took a lot of work to keep track of when feeding). A pair of good snake tongs is essential here, not just to offer the rat while keeping your hands out of danger, but for pushing back encroaching lizards. Obesity is a major health risk with monitors, as they really do not have an off-switch when it comes to their appetite (this is especially true in zoos where the diet tends to be more rodent-heavy, especially for species that would have more diverse, less-fatty prey in the wild). On the plus side, they are very easy to exercise by making them chase food.

For a monitor not to be hungry is a very unusual situation, and often sign of illness. Our biggest white-throat monitor went off feed, so I was assisting a (very eccentric) senior keeper in feeding her. We’d push the rat down her throat, she’d hack it back up, we’d repeat. Suddenly, the senior keeper asked if I had my camera at work that day (this was before cell phone cameras were a thing). As it happened, I did. He asked me to grab it, as he had something he wanted to try. I thought he was going to show me some secret feeding technique, and I was eager to learn, so I went and got the camera. Instead, he shoved the rat into the monitor’s mouth, clamping her jaws shut on it. Then, he bit the other half of the rat himself – that rat which was, but now, thoroughly drenched in varanid saliva – and, through gritted teeth, shouted for me to take the picture, while he pretended to have a tug-of-war with the lizard.

View attachment 765805
Keeper having a tug-of-war with a monitor. The picture on the mesh above the monitor's head was a photo of the mangled hand of the curator at a different zoo, bitten by a croc monitor, which was posted in our building as a warning to be careful... and, I suspect, to mock the guy

Except for venomous snakes, monitors, in my mind, pose the greatest safety risk to keepers of any reptile. Sure, a big croc can mess you up, but they are largely sluggish animals, tend to stay close to the water, and at least only have two sets of weaponry – the mouth and the tail. I’ve never actually met a keeper who’s suffered a significant injury from a crocodilian. Monitors, on the other hand, are lightning fast, very active, and have wicked sharp claws; even when I’ve grabbed the head and tail, I’ve still been raked by claws. They can also climb and jump, including dropping down on you from above. The lone tri-color monitor I worked with had the distinction of putting three keepers in the hospital; she’d rest on a ledge above the door to her holding area, then drop down on unsuspecting keepers as they entered. I lived in absolute terror of her, though strangely enough, she never showed the slightest aggression to me. Still, I don’t know if I know a single keeper who has worked with monitors for very long without getting something to show for it. At one conference I went to early in my career, all the keepers and curators were whispering about one curator who had just arrived, his first appearance since having his hand mangled by a female croc monitor.

Many of the monitors were kept off exhibit, some of them in enclosures that I know recognize were way too small and sterile for such active, intelligent animals (there’s a regrettable tendency for reptile curators in zoos to become hoarders – at many zoos I’ve been too, only about a tenth of the herp collection has been on public display, though this trend has been changing for the better). Some were kept off exhibit to participate in studies, including those on varanid cognition. Others were kept off for security reasons. I asked the curator once why we didn’t put our Gray’s monitors (a tremendous rarity back in those days, and one which other zoo professionals would visit us specifically to see) on exhibit – we had plenty of options. He said he was afraid to let the public know we had them, or they might steal them. It was a silly argument, I thought – anyone who would actually want to steal them probably already knew we had them, whereas to the general public they’d just be another big lizard. A fruit-eating varanid is a concept which I find fascinating - it’s as unique as a bamboo-eating bear.

View attachment 765806
Gray's monitor in holding. Read Walter Auffenberg's book for more on this fascinating species!

I feel that monitors would benefit from outdoor exhibits more than most other reptiles, but I’ve only worked with the taxa outdoors twice. Once was with the perenties at one zoo (compared to many other varanids, perenties have struck me as kind of sluggish and dull – one coworker referred to them (pardon any offense) as the cheerleaders of varanids, pretty but not especially bright). The other was a pair of crocodile monitors at one zoo. The croc monitors normally lived inside the reptile h9ouse, but a primate/small carnivore cage had recently been vacated, and the decision was made to put them outside for the summer. The male promptly climbed up the tallest branch in the exhibit, fell asleep in the sun, and, apart from meals, didn’t budge for days at a time. The female, however, proved to be a challenge. She developed a weird habit of hanging from the mesh, her head through one opening, her outstretched front feet on an opening on either side, her body and tailing hanging down; it looked like she was hanging from a cross. It didn’t take her too long, however, to realize that if her head fit through, the rest of her would follow, and she soon began to escape. Repeatedly. Each time, she had to be run down by a dozen keepers, and when brought to bay would face them fiercely, lunging, lashing with her whip-like tail, and fencing with the snare pool before she’d finally be caught. After the third time, the decision was made to return the monitors to the reptile house.

As I mentioned early on, crocodile monitors hold a special place for me as my favorite varanids, both to see in zoos and to work with. I don’t know if I’ve ever met a reptile in which there is such behavioral dimorphism between the sexes. The females tend to be sassy spitfires, ready to take on the world; it was a female that repeatedly escaped the exhibit, and a female which mauled the curator I mentioned at the conference. The males, on the other hand – much larger, and very striking with their bulbous, Roman snouts – tend to be like big, serene dogs, sometimes borderline affectionate. And it’s lucky for us that they’re so chill, because they have the potential to do a lot of harm. At one zoo, we were bringing a big male croc monitor that had just completed quarantine from the hospital to the reptile house. Getting from one to the other, especially when we were open on a busy day, was most easily done by driving outside the zoo, on a stretch of highway. A keeper went over, put the monitor in a trash can, put the can in his car, and drove to the reptile house. The rest of us were at the reptile house when, half an hour later, we realized that our colleague hadn’t arrived yet (the drive should have taken ten minutes on a bad day). We waited. We called his cellphone. Nothing. We were about to launch a search party when the gate opened and, very, very, very slowly, the keeper pulled in. He was sitting bolt upright in his seat, hands white on the wheel, eyes bulging and unblinking. Sprawled across his dashboard was the croc monitor, having wiggled out of the can and coming up to see him. No wonder he was too scared to go more than half a mile an hour.

The croc monitor lived behind the scenes, and he was a joy to work with. When I’d do that section of the building, I’d unlock his cage and let him loose while I worked. Sometimes, I’d feel a tug on my pant leg, and the next thing I knew he’d be crawling up my back, draped across my shoulders, forked tongue flickering in every direction. When I’d hose him down, his leopard-like patterning of gold on green shone brilliantly, and he was the most beautiful animal in the zoo.

View attachment 765808

I'm really enjoying this thread, especially the memories its prompting. Many years ago ,probably 45 actually, John Foden a good friend of mine and zoo manager of Drayton Manor zoo asked if I would like to see a new exhibit in the old reptile house (demolished a long time ago) ,of course said I. In this reptile house to get from one end to the other you had to go through each exhibit. I was quite happy to view the new animals through the public glass viewing windows. John was having none of this, he wanted us to go through the exhibits to the one he wanted to show me, which was at the end of the row of six. As we entered the second one, he muttered something about keeping an eye out, no sooner had he said it a very large Nile Monitor clamped its jaws around my left foot, trying hard to pull my shoe off . What ensued was a tug of war between me and John and the Monitor. With all the shout and swearing, quite a large group of visitors were watching and laughing at the spectacle. We eventually won the contest and dashing through the door and slammed it shut. By now we were both sweating alot,then I realised we were in the third exhibit. John said not to worry and we should continue through to the end exhibit (which by the way,I can't remember for the life of me what it was) and with a bit of luck the Monitor would have calmed down by the time we went back. When we did eventually enter the Monitor exhibit he never even looked at us. My foot was bruised for days and my shoe was ruined. Happy Days!!

 

[MClaeys]

Just amazing to see some part of the zookeeper’s job like this. It was once a dream job to word at the zoo, but seeing some of your work is just fascinating and also the passion you put in it. I love to read your reports.