A Zoo Man's Notebook, 2025

[Aardwolf]

Compared to the New World monkeys, my experience with Old World monkeys is very limited. Apart from a few days of relief work, helping out when short-staffed in a primate house at one zoo (an experience which I’m forced to conclude that neither the animals nor myself enjoyed), I’ve only worked with two species.

The lone guereza colobus that I cared for was at a non-AZA zoo that I rather wish neither of us had been at. Colobus are famous among zookeepers and visitors alike for their perpetually sad-looking faces. Well, I know that they always look like that – but I swear, this one was depressed. Which is an extra pity, because colobus are some of the few monkeys that I really like – not just in that I think they’re cool, but I like their personalities. They always strike me as more serene and even-mannered than many other monkeys, perhaps because their leaf-based diet doesn’t leave them with enough energy to be jerks. Perhaps not coincidentally, they mix well with many other species, including smaller primates, such as guenons (I often see them with Allen’s swamp monkeys). Perhaps this also explains why, from a sustainability perspective, these guys are in much better shape than many of the other Old World monkeys.

The colobus lived in a shabby exhibit of plywood, with limited opportunities for climbing and exploring. These are very arboreal primates, even more monkeys, and I could just about touch the ceiling when I stood on my tip toes. More importantly, he was alone, and these are some very social primates (seeing this species in the wild was my first hint of how unnaturally small the groups we keep many monkey species in really are). Now, sometimes an animal of a normally social species has to be kept alone for one reason or another – that animal’s particular behavior, medical concerns, etc. Maybe you are down to one individual of a species that you are going to phase out, and that animal is old so you don’t feel comfortable shipping it out, but you also don’t want to bring in more (this was the case for the Speke’s gazelle I described a few posts ago – the joke was on us, though, because the little guy was determined to live forever, or at least try to, out of spite). Fair enough. This animal was a perfectly healthy, fairly young, and, as far as I could tell, behaviorally competent. If we weren’t going to get another one (and getting another would have been fairly irresponsible, in my opinion, with the size and condition of our enclosure), we should have shipped this one out.

There was only a small indoor holding area – not much more than a closet – attached to the exhibit, and I never wanted to intrude on that, so the colobus and I shared space whenever I cleaned the exhibit. Quarters were tight – sometimes, I actually felt his tail brush against my face if he turned around suddenly – which is actually a little daunting, because those guys have some teeth on them, leaf-eaters be damned. He would calmly take a primate biscuit from my hand with an air of gravity and dignity, then retreat as far from me as he could to eat, while I tried to hide produce (mostly lettuce – again, leaf-eaters) as best as I could in a tiny, dingy little exhibit and pretend that it counted as enrichment.

My experiences with the second species were better, at least.

I worked with a pair of DeBrazza’s monkeys at another non-AZA zoo. The enclosure that they were in the same as those I described earlier for the galahs, king vulture, Andean condor, and ring-tailed lemurs at that facility – a wood and wire frame, mulch substrate, branches and stumps, and an attached indoor area heated with red bulbs; we had the ability to lock them into this stall in cold weather, defined as below freezing (though I’d often let them have access on days that were colder than that if it was sunny and felt warm – it was such a small space in there that I hated to have them cooped up if it wasn’t absolutely necessary). It wasn’t going to win any exhibit awards, but it was much better than what the colobus had, so it looked decent to me at the time.



I’ve often felt that DeBrazza’s are an ideal monkey for smaller zoos. Unlike many guenons, they’re naturally found in pairs quite often, instead of large troops, so it’s much easier to maintain a more natural social group (at other zoos, if you have just one male and one female guenon, the female can become quite stressed, as the male, hard-wired to exert his control over a harem of females, just has one girlfriend to devote his attention to, and can harass her constantly). And, true enough, our female DeBrazza – bearded, as the male was – was a fairly calm, sweet individual.

Of course, maybe she was allowed to be that way because the male was too focused on driving me crazy.

The male loved to play the game of tag. He’d ignore me completely as I serviced the exhibit, watching him out of the corner of my eye, until my attention would inevitably be distracted – a loud noise elsewhere, a visitor with a question, a radio call – and then he’d jump onto my back, then ricochet off before I could even react. He never tried to bite or do anything remotely aggressive – he just liked to jump on me and get a reaction, then bounce off to a high perch to look smugly at me as I glared at him.

Diet consisted of monkey chow in the morning. In the afternoon, I’d come by with a bucket of chopped produce that I’d spread out among the primates, parrots, warthogs, etc. I tried to scatter the produce as best as I could to allow both animals to get roughly even amounts (though I was not above handing a few special treats directly to the female). Otherwise, the male would grab as much as he could, as fast as he could, and stuff it into his cheeks for later.

One day, I saw a large, laughing crowd in front of the DeBrazza’s monkeys, which never struck me as a good sign. I hurried over just in time to see a glint of silver. Someone had thoughtfully tossed the monkeys a pocketful of change, and the male had a quarter in his mouth. Thinking to myself that I now knew how I was going to spend the rest of the afternoon, I went inside. After gathering up the rest of the coins, I set myself to the task of trying to get it away from him. Unfortunately, monkeys are smart, and while he didn’t particularly want the coin, he knew that I did, which gave him the upper hand. Climbing around the top of the exhibit, he worked his jaw repeatedly, stopping now and then to pull the quarter out, make sure that I could see it and admire it, and then tuck it back into his cheek pouches. Eventually, we came to an arrangement. I radioed for a coworker to bring me a banana (a major concession at that very-stingy zoo) and traded it to the monkey for the quarter… which I kept after he dropped it for me, perhaps the only time I’ve ever been tipped by one of the animals.

It was one of my fondest wishes at that zoo to breed the DeBrazza’s and I was excited when I saw our female start to get a little round. I was already set to transfer to another zoo, and it was a race between me and the baby to see if it would make it’s exit from the womb before I left the zoo. Unfortunately for me, I won that race. The female gave birth just a few days after I had packed up and left.

 

[Aardwolf]

Perhaps the most beautiful of owls is the spectacled owl of Central and South America. It’s also easily one of the most common non-native owls in American zoo collections, both in accredited zoos and in the private sector; I knew one keeper who actually had one, a surplus bird from his zoo, as a personal pet! My first professional experience with the species came as a keeper at a small non-AZA zoo. A single spectacled owl was kept in a rather grim, dark barn (I suppose it was originally intended to be a barn owl exhibit?), one of the least suitable owl exhibits I’d ever seen. A second owl was later added in hopes of breeding, which never occurred. I was tasked with trying to train her for the glove to be an ambassador, a task which, if memory serves me well, mostly consisted of me standing in the cage for long stretches of time with a rat draped over my glove, wondering if she was ever going to come down to me. She never did. It was during that fruitless period that I first read Karen Pryor’s Don’t Shoot the Dog, back when I sort of fancied myself a trainer (one aspect of zookeeping that, taken as a whole, I never had a tremendous amount of success with).


Spectacled owl in the barn, looking at me like I'm an idiot for expecting her to fly to my glove.

I worked with spectacled owls in much greater depth at an AZA zoo. We had a lovely exhibit, wild and tangled and lush, off the path in a quiet section, where we had two females. Later, a third female owl – a former education bird named “Miss Specs,” or “Specs McGee” or variations thereof - was added. I think every zoo back then had a bird like her – an ancient ambassador animal, blind, decrepit, flightless, missing a lot of feathers (especially at the top of her head, from an ill-fated encounter with a heat lamp years ago), looks like a badly-made Muppet, and absolutely adored by everyone who worked with her. Many of our newer keepers were former volunteers or interns with the education department and had worked with this owl in that capacity, and all treated her like their absolute baby. If we'd given them a chance, I think they all would have spent the winter knitting her little sweaters and scarves.

Husbandry of the owls was very simple. Each morning, I’d go in and briefly clean the exhibit, cleaning up any uneaten food (there was a tendency for rodent intestines to be found caked and dried on upper branches), raking up any pellets and poop, scrubbing perches as needed, and checking the integrity of everything. In the evening, shortly before closing, I’d return and place their diet. Each owl got 1 medium rat, or two or three mice or day-old chicks.



The aviary was maybe 35 feet long, 15 feet wide and about as tall, consisting of woven mesh stretched over two wooden upright supports, with a wooden fence back (there was no keeper area, which was the major flaw of the exhibit). The floor of the exhibit was essentially a large mat of ivy, with paths of bare dirt running through it to accommodate the keepers. A few small shrubs grew to a height of a few feet, providing some cover. There were a few large pieces of deadfall set up as a trees at either end of the exhibit, with the central part being kept clear and open as a flight path, and the owls would periodically fly from one end of the exhibit to the other. There was a small water feature that held about three gallons of water as a drinker, and a large, flat rock that served as a dinner table, where we’d place food. There were two large open-fronted nest boxes, heated with red bulbs. Years ago, the zoo had also maintained snowy owls and had swapped the snowys and the spectacleds out as the seasons changed, but it seems that spectacled owls tolerate the cold better than snowys tolerate the heat, so the decision was made before I started to focus on a single species. Over all, it was perhaps the most attractive spectacled owl exhibit I’d seen in a US zoo.

Note my use of the past-tense.

One day –to be precise, my birthday – I was in the Zoo Hospital talking with some coworkers, trying to decide where we would go for dinner that night, when we heard a sudden crash right outside. An enormous pine tree fell over, destroying the owl exhibit. Just 10 minutes earlier, many of us had been gathered outside that exhibit, and if it had fallen then, it may have gotten us all. We all ran to the scene, just as all three owls, all miraculously unharmed, made themselves seen. I flung myself at one of the flighted females and grabbed her instantly. To my intense irritation, all of my colleagues – ALL of them – ran in a panic to grab Specs and make sure she was okay and coo and fuss over her… the flightless, blind, easy to catch owl – which allowed the other flighted owl to take off. What ensued was a months-long game of cat and mouse as I tried everything I could think of to catch the fugitive, from tracking her all night in a van to setting up a series of traps which she easily sprung (I remember shaking my fist at her as she sat in a tree directly above me, eating the rat that was supposed to have been the bait in the trap). Meanwhile, we were flooded with non-helpful calls from the public reportedly seeing the owl several states away… I once received a call from a person who was 100% sure he saw her two states away, while I was looking directly at her in a tree on zoo grounds.

Then, one morning, two keepers were cleaning the Bison Exhibit, and there was the owl – asleep, sprawled out on top of a peahen she’d killed overnight. She was dutifully caught up – and later I took a lot of satisfaction in crating her up and sending her off to another zoo… one where she was kept indoors. Months after she was caught, I would still occasionally get a call from the public, letting me know that our owl was in a tree in their yard.

 

[Aardwolf]

For today’s profile, we’ll look at the bird that I often think of as the forgotten ratite, the greater rhea. Though very few guests actually know what it is – and most think of them as ostriches or, if they’re exhibited with ostriches, as has been the case at a few safari parks I’ve seen, baby ostriches – they are one of the most common of animals in the non-AZA sector. They are especially popular in safari parks, where, along with llamas, fallow deer, and a few other species, they provide bulk for the experience. One safari park I’ve worked at had close to 100 rheas, though they were not in my section (which I’m glad of – not only were they a pain to keep track of, but they – and especially their chicks – were constantly being predated by coyotes, to the distress of their keepers).



I’ve worked with this species at three facilities, two non-AZA, one AZA. At the two non-AZA, I’ll admit that the birds never really caught my attention, and almost seemed lost among all of the other animals. At one, they were kept in a large, somewhat weedy field, with grass so tall that I’d often only see the heads and necks of the birds as they moved through the grasses, losing them entirely when they ducked down. At the second, they were in a large, multi-acre paddock with ostrich and emu, as well as bison, zebra, various deer and antelope, and camelids. With so much action going on in that yard, it’s easy to understand why the rhea were a bit overlooked – they were the smallest animals in that paddock, and mostly moved around the periphery, approaching visitors for food when there was an opening for them, but mostly keeping to themselves. Husbandry-wise they were non-entities, and I might be excused back then for thinking that they were… well, dull.

It wasn’t until I got to the AZA zoo that I really came to enjoy rheas.

We had, initially, a male and female (brother and sister), both hatched out at the zoo and sharing a large, lightly-wooded paddock with capybara and guanaco. The female was a rather sweet, if annoyingly inquisitive bird. She liked to follow me around as I cleaned the yard, and the second I turned my attention away from the wheelbarrow I was pushing, she’d hurry up to it and start grabbing things out of it with her beak (she seemed especially fascinated by the shed tail covert feathers of our peafowl, which I’d rake up and put in the wheelbarrow) and start tossing them in the air, making quite a mess. Her curiosity made her quite approachable, but only to a limit. She was fine with your presence until you were about two feet away. Then, she’d bolt in a crazed panic, like she just realized that you were a potential predator. Then, five minutes later, she’d again be overcome by curiosity and be back in your business.

Her brother, on the other hand… he was unnamed when I started at the zoo, so I took to calling him Jack. As in, the Ripper.

He was a fiercely pugnacious bird. Somedays he’d be at the gate waiting for me, trying to strike me through the fence. Other days, I’d be raking the yard, when suddenly I’d hear the sound of hard, scaly feet striking the ground as he came charging up from behind. I’d spin to face him, and we’d have a stand off. Ever play Mario, and there are those ghosts which freeze when you face them, and advance on you when you turn around (or the weeping angels from Doctor Who)? That’s kind of what cleaning the rhea exhibit was like. If you stared him down, he’d pace in front of you and glower, but wouldn’t do much. If you turned, he’d charge. Despite all of his aggression, I was only pecked a few times, and he never showed any inclination to kick, as I would expect an ostrich to do. Being much smaller than an ostrich, I never really found him that threatening, though he scared the crap out of newer keepers who had never encountered that sort of hostility before. Sometimes, I even had fun with it. Once or twice, I’d walk down the path alongside his exhibit, then leap the fence and start sprinting across the yard for the gate. He’d always experience a moment of shock and disbelief, and then take off after me like a flash. I usually got to the gate just before he did – I like to think that this silly exercise not only gave him a workout, but also boosted his confidence as well. As I’d lock the gate behind me and walk away, I could imagine him standing on the other side of the fence shouting “That’s right, you better run!”


Jack the rhea, ready for a throw-down

Jack reserved his fiercest ire for our longest serving keeper (ironically, one who had raised him and his sister). Maybe it’s because this fellow was an older man who didn’t have the energy to run from Jack and was more willing to use a rake to push the bird back (which didn’t always work – more than once I walked past the exhibit to find the male rhea’s beak clamped on the tines of the rake, refusing to let go as the exasperated keeper tried to clean). A theory that had some popularity on the staff was that it was because this keeper always wore a baseball cap, and the rhea thought that the cap looked like a beak, and therefore that this keeper was a big bird.

After Jack passed away, we brought in two more female rheas. They immediately got along just fine with our original bird, and the three dutifully began laying eggs all over the place. These were obviously infertile, so they were pulled. Some were used for treats for some the animals. Some were hollowed out and used for enrichment (drill a hole and stuff them with treats for, say, the coatis). Many I cleaned out and sold to the public as a fundraiser for our AAZK chapter’s conservation efforts. And of course I kept one for myself.

Rhea husbandry is fairly simple. We fed the Mazuri ratite diet, ad lib in a hanging metal trough (we fed the guanacos in the yard a different grain, and the two species ate each other’s grain regularly). The rheas were also given produce as enrichment, diced and scattered around the yard. They frequently tried to steal the capybara’s diets, forcing us to feed the capybaras in a sub-enclosure we built of wire fencing with a doorway too low for the rheas to use. Water was provided by a trough, though the rheas sometimes drank from the pool in the yard that the capybara used as a toilet – we could see no way to prevent this, apart from making sure that they always had fresh water elsewhere, and trying to keep the capy pool as clean as we could.

The birds stayed out year round, though they had access to a large shed, walled on three sides and open on the front, with some heat lamps added. I’ve mentioned when discussing ostriches and emus, but ratites aren’t as cold-tolerant as a lot of people assume they are – they will survive pretty cold weather, but their feathers don’t provide the best insulation. Rheas do seem to do better in the cold than ostrich or emu, though (though a well-respected bird curator I know has told me she’d die happy if she could get people to accept that these birds would benefit from warmth and shelter in the winter). After snowfall, we’d work to open up patches of bare ground for the birds to rest in, and then opened up hay bales for them to bed down in (providing extra hay for the guanacos to eat so that they wouldn’t eat the rhea beds).

The birds were healthy and vigorous the entire time I worked with them, though they can be sensitive to stress; at one facility, a rhea was coming to us from another zoo but had a very rough trip, with a flat tire en route, long delays, etc, and passed from capture myopathy within hours of his arrival. I’d worry a lot about the risk of them ingesting hardware, as inquisitive as they are, but thankfully have never had any problems with this. They are prodigious poopers, and I’d fill up a few shovel loads of their soft-serve ice cream droppings in the course of a day, sometimes straight up fecals, sometimes mixed with urates (I liked those ones more – the splash of white made them much easier to find among the pine needles that carpeted the floor of their exhibit).

As enrichment, I tried to manage the floor of their exhibit for different substrates – a particularly sunny spot I kept raked clear to allow grass to grow, which they grazed on, while a second spot I raked down to bare earth, so that they could dust bathe. As I’ve said, they were very curious animals and responded well to object-based enrichment as well, especially anything that they could manipulate, but not swallow. Large metal spoons dangling from strings amused them to no end, with lots of pecking and batting around.

 

[Aardwolf]

For today’s post, we’ll be looking at three mid-sized to large boids – the yellow anaconda, Dumeril’s ground boa, and common boa (which for most of my career has just been treated as Boa constrictor, so we’ll view it as such here). Much of what I’ve previously written about large pythons applies to these snakes as well.

I’ve worked with Dumeril’s boa at one AZA zoo, yellow anaconda at one AZA zoo, and boa constrictor at one AZA and one non-AZA zoo. Care for the Dumeril’s and the Boa were fairly similar. At all three facilities, they were kept off-exhibit and primarily acted as ambassador animals. They lived in vision cages with wood chip substrate (sometimes replaced with Eco Earth), some branches for climbing (more appreciated by the younger Dumeril’s boas), a tub for soaking, a hide box or two, and a heat lamp and UV lamp at one end of the enclosure. Diet was pre-killed rats all around.



At one point, I turned one of our ambassador boa constrictors into a seasonal exhibit animal, moving her into the exhibit that our alligators used in the warmer months. It wasn't an ideal set up, not being made for snakes, but it did provide her with a lot more space and climbing opportunities. I especially enjoyed seeing her use the large pool.



These two species are snakes which are almost perfect as ambassador animals – large enough to be impressive yet small enough that a single keeper can safely handle them, and typically of good temperament (the BC more so that the Dumeril, in my experience, but the Dumeril’s aren’t that bad). The BC, however, was an absolute rock star of an ambassador animal; I suspect that more photos exist of me with this snake than of me with my wife, based on all of the public appearances we made at different events

Of course, not everyone appreciates snakes as animal ambassadors. On a slow day in one reptile house, I once decided to brighten the day of the few visitors who had braved the foul weather by pulling out a large Dumeril’s boa and walking out into the lobby with it. As soon as I stepped into the public area, one woman took one glimpse of me and began to actually sprint away. She ran away looking over her shoulder to make sure the snake wasn’t chasing after her... and ran smack into a locked door. Thankfully, when she came to, she was understanding.



As it happens, I have only been present for one large boa bite in my career, and I was not on the bitten end. If anything, I had the more ridiculous end of the deal.


Though I think of them as fairly docile sausages, Dumeril’s boas are still decently large snakes. Nowhere in the same class as a green anaconda or a reticulated python, but big enough that if you happen to let yourself get distracted and one bites you, you can be sure that your attention will be redirected to the snake. Quickly.


A colleague and I were taking a six-foot Dumeril’s boa to the hospital for a radiograph. Snakes are not naturally included to stretch out, so we did the stretching for her. I held the tail. He held the head. Maybe we should have switched.

It turns out my grip on the tail was better than his grip on the head. He was bitten on the hand. Now, I hadn't known this about my friend - maybe it was something he was embarrassed about - but it turns out he was one of those fellows who can't stand the sight of his own blood. It's not the pain, it's just the sensation of watching for own blood seep out of your body. He took one look at his hand, and he started to faint.

All of the assembled vets and vet techs grabbed him and rushed him away to treat the wound and treat shock and, I don't know, give me a cookie and juice to get his blood sugar up. I don't know. I wasn't there in the other room with them. I was the one who had to still deal with the snake, who by now had gotten her first taste of human blood and apparently wanted more.

Without much in the way of options, I threw myself on the exam table and lay down on top of her, grabbing her head and pinning the rest of her down with my weight. An angrily writhing snake under you does not feel great, especially from friction in some of the more delicate areas (particularly if it gets under your keys and radio and starts to dig those into you). Still, I held (laid?) my ground... and that is where the vets found me twenty minutes later...

Of the three species, the yellow anacondas were my favorite. I worked with two – a mother, about 9 feet long, and her parthenogenic daughter. Both were obtained by our zoo for a new exhibit, and I was very excited for their arrival. Like many reptiles, they were sent from their former zoo to our facility via FedEx, and I was tracking their progress when I saw that they were stalled by a storm, and were going to be spending the night at a cargo facility in Memphis. It was October, and I spent most of the night nervously checking the weather in Tennessee in case they were mistakenly left out overnight in the cold. When they did arrive, I’ll admit that I was a bit perplexed. When I looked at the box that arrived, it seemed like there was no way that 9 feet of snake (plus her daughter, about three feet or so) could possibly be in that box. I began to suspect that the sending zoo had made a mistake. Sure enough, though, when I opened the box, lifted the Styrofoam inner lid, and pulled out to two large cloth bags, there she was in all of her serpentine glory.

When the day came to move the big girl from quarantine to her exhibit, I was mindful of the fact that our keepers had little large snake experience, so I wrote up a detailed safety protocol (our director was very into detailed safety protocols. They were kind of his passion project). I drained the pool, climbed down with the snake, and then, when everyone said they were ready, I grabbed the head. This was supposed to be the cue for everyone else to grab onto the snake. No one did. For a very awkward 60 seconds, I stood there with the snake’s head in my hands and everyone else standing, watching nervously. Finally, our newest keeper – probably seventy pounds in her boots and not an inch over five feet – hurled herself onto the snake, which seemed to shame everyone else into motion. We held the snake out for the vet to examine one more time, and then carried her the short distance to her new home. The anaconda was actually a surprisingly tranquil animal – I’d been prepared for a lot of thrashing, coupled with the explosive projectile defecation which can make these animals almost impossible to hold on to, but she was perfectly chill.



The anacondas were slated for a new exhibit, which we had custom ordered from an exhibit fabricator and had assembled waiting for her. I had designed it myself (which is great, because then when it goes wrong, at least you have no one else to blame) – a L-shaped habitat with a service door at either end, so that if the snake was coiled at one door, you could enter through the other. There was a deep pool for total submersion and underwater viewing and some climbing structures to get close to the heat and light. This was for the adult – the smaller daughter was kept in a trough in the back (we’d gotten her to start growing a replacement – we had no idea how old the mother was and how long she might be with us).

The snake was a magnificent exhibit animal. Even more importantly from my perspective, she ate like a champ. She was fed large rats (sometimes rabbits) off of tongs, and I don’t think I ever fed her when she wasn’t in the pool. A crowd would gather at the glass while I gently tapped the surface of the water with the rat. Gradually, she would awaken, position herself beneath the surface, and then, like a harpoon, launch herself at the rodent, pulling it under the water. As a safety precaution, I made it a rule that two people had to be present in the back of the reptile house to feed her. Those feedings manifested themselves later in large fecals, and I always considered it a great day when I came in to a pile of poop on the land portion of the exhibit as opposed to the water. Every month or so, I’d pull the snake out to give the exhibit a very good cleaning, which also provided us with a chance to weigh the snake and give her a quick exam.

 

[Aardwolf]

Today’s post is about one of the largest of land animals, the white rhino. It’s strange how things have turned around for this species – there was a time when it was considered the rarest rhino in the wild, and a very uncommon animal in zoos. Crandall says that the first record of the species in a zoo didn’t come until 1946… and that was in a South African Zoo. It blows my mind to think that there was a time when the London Zoo had four species of rhino at one time – and that the one that they couldn’t get was the white rhino! Today, this is the most common rhino in the wild and in zoos, and the only species that is especially widespread outside of AZA facilities in North America.

My experience with white rhinos came in the form of a male-female pair at an AZA facility. The hope had been that they would breed, but the male was considerably younger than the female when they were introduced, and it seemed that he thought of her as more of a mother than as a mate. The enclosure was a large, soil-substrated yard (the grass didn’t last too long), with several berms and rock mounds to break it up, fronted with a large pool. Two mud wallows were constantly maintained for them. There were a few trees, protected by rocks or fencing from the horns of the animals. At the back of the yard were two large off-exhibit outdoor holding yards, and then the barn, which consisted of three large cement-floored stalls, connected by hydraulic doors.



Diet consisted of timothy hay (over thirty pounds per rhino), alfalfa (in much smaller quantities), and grain, with some produce for enrichment.

Apart from how big they are, what I remember the most about the rhinos was how surprisingly soft they were – especially the folds on their skin (I’ve also touched Indian and Sumatran rhinos, and white rhinos are way softer, in my experience). They enjoy tactile enrichment, and even if food is not involved will often readily approach keepers for petting and scratching, the latter often resulting in big chunks of dried mud flicking off their hide (like elephants, rhinos in zoos tend to be the color of whatever their substrate is), and will readily take food from your hands with their broad lips (I remember being surprised at how high they could life their heads, all things considered). Many facilities offer behind-the-scenes (or, sometimes, public) training and interaction sessions with their rhinos. The only risky part, in my experience, was trying to make sure that you didn’t accidentally get a hand caught between the bulk of the rhinos and the iron bollards that formed the barrier in holding; I once had a rhino turn its head suddenly and catch by fingers between the horn and the bars, and it was a painful experience.

Speaking of the horn, it’s amazing when you’re very close to it to see that it really is just compacted hair – as in, you can often see little frayed patches of it sticking out from the main horn. Cupping the tip of a horn in your hand, you are also dimly aware that you have an absolute fortune in your hand – attached to a very large, charismatic animal. I don’t know the protocol at other zoos, but at our facility, when a rhino died its horns were removed and sent to the USFWS lab for use in education, training, and research programs.

Like other rhinos, white rhinos enjoy making their presence known in the form of massive piles of droppings, used to mark their territories. There’s a school of thought among some zoo folks to not clean rhino dung heaps every day, but rather let the rhinos keep them up for a while to recognize their territorial claim. One thing I prefer about rhino poop over urine is that poop lacks any offensive capabilities. Standing behind a urinating rhino is like standing in front of a firehose, which I have come a lot closer to experiencing than I would have liked. Walking down the corridor of the rhino barn, not able to see the rhinos because of a wall in the way, I suddenly saw (and heard… and smelled… and felt… and sort of tasted) a powerful blast of piss shooting directly across the corridor, right in front of me, where I was about to step. I got a little of the mist effect from it, but it could have been worse – had I been three steps ahead, I’d probably have been pinned to the wall by the force of the stream.


A rhino greeting a visitor on a BTS tour. Notice how dirty the hand is after rubbing down the rhino

The most social and tractable of the rhinos, the white rhino is often incorporated into mixed exhibits, and ours were housed with plains zebra and ostriches, and I’ve seen them kept with many other species, large and small, at other facilities. This social, docile nature (which seems to extend to the wild rhinos as well – every black rhino I’ve seen in the wild looked like it either wanted to run away or fight me. Every wild white rhino looked like it wanted to ask if I had any alfalfa cubes in my pockets) has made them very popular exhibit animals, as well as the darling of private game reserves in their native South Africa, where they are more easily seen and approached than black rhinos (these game reserves have also provided a source of white rhinos for export to the US, which helps explain the presence outside of AZA). The downside of their social nature, however, is that they breed best when in a group, rather than pairs; San Diego Zoo famously had a bull white rhino that would not breed, but when he was moved to the newly-opened Wild Animal Park with an actual herd, he proved to be quite a stud). Many urban zoos, in my experience, now house black rhinos, for which a pair managed separately is more appropriate. White rhinos have been the primary beneficiary of zoos phasing out their African elephants and moving into those larger spaces (I feel like 90% of the elephant exhibits I see, I comment to myself, “That’ll make a good rhino exhibit someday…”). With white rhinos, I’d say you can’t go wrong with bigger exhibits to provide as much room for a good-sized herd.

The only conflict I ever saw between our white rhinos was following a playful sparring match, which seemed to get out of hand, probably due to the youthful energy of the male. By accident, he hooked a horn under the front leg of the female and flipped her; she landed in a water trough (not sure how she even fit in it) several feet away. We separated them immediately to check her out, and while the vets looked her over (she was, thankfully, ok), I sat with the male and tried to calm him down, since he was very agitated. I put my hand on his shoulder to try and reassure him, and jerked it back in a hurry – he was as hot as a baked brick. I went and splashed a little water on him and he actually steamed. Sparring matches between the two were common, but except for this one, which escalated for some reason, they all seemed playful and good-natured.

 

[snowleopard]

It's fascinating to see how White Rhinos have been kept in larger herds and more spacious exhibits as time has gone by. It's not uncommon to see a half-dozen together, often mixed with antelope in sprawling African Savanna yards.

The next trend that has emerged is to have some rhino indoor areas with a thick layer of mulch on the floor, especially for Indian Rhinos. I've seen quite a few zoos (mainly in Europe) give their rhinos a softer flooring indoors, which is terrific, but it then pains me a little when I visit other zoos and the barns are all cement with little to no natural substrate. How did you manage the White Rhino hooves? Did you ever have problems with their feet?

 

[Strathmorezoo]

It's fascinating to see how White Rhinos have been kept in larger herds and more spacious exhibits as time has gone by. It's not uncommon to see a half-dozen together, often mixed with antelope in sprawling African Savanna yards.

The next trend that has emerged is to have some rhino indoor areas with a thick layer of mulch on the floor, especially for Indian Rhinos. I've seen quite a few zoos (mainly in Europe) give their rhinos a softer flooring indoors, which is terrific, but it then pains me a little when I visit other zoos and the barns are all cement with little to no natural substrate. How did you manage the White Rhino hooves? Did you ever have problems with their feet?

White Rhino feet aren't usually regarded as problematic, however, some zoos do nail work. According to EAZA, Rhino accommodation should provide both hard and soft standing. The outdoor enclosure should be large enough to provide this. The indoor enclosure can have concrete floors, but it should also provide soft area of mulch/ rubber standing

 

[Aardwolf]

@snowleopard , pretty much what @Strathmorezoo said. We didn't have any foot problems that I can recall in that set up, but the rhinos had a fair amount of outdoor access. In the past few years, there has been much more focus on having soft substrate in holding areas.

Today, we’ll look at an animal that is, depending on who you ask, one of the easiest or one of the most frustrating of species to work with, the black-tailed prairie dog. I’ve worked with this species at three AZA and two non-AZA zoos, and after many years of experiences with the species, the little rodents still confound me.

At virtually every zoo, prairie dogs are not managed as individuals, but as a group – as in, they have one ID record, and there’s no tracking of individual animals (unless there is a special reason, such as an injured animal is separated from the group – though that seldom happens for reasons we’ll get into). You very seldom have any idea how many you actually have. They’re born underground. They usually die underground (and then are entombed by their coterie-mates). They typically all look alike – apart from the endless scars and patches of pulled hair that they inflict upon one another. There have been times when I’ve been unsure as to whether I’ve had any left in a colony or if it was empty… and then, a week later, babies started spewing out of the burrow entrances like lava from a volcano. Not surprisingly, at many zoos the historic approach to managing prairie dogs has been 1) add food, 2) add water, 3) leave them be. The birth rate would equal the death rate, and the exhibit would be self-sustaining.


When you look closely at prairie dogs in many zoos, you'll see how scruffy they often are. Part of this can be seasonal. Part of it is because they are not especially nice little animals (which, to be fair, also has a seasonal component)

This method of prairie dog management can cause some controversy in the zoo community. On one hand, you have folks who love it, not just from an ease-of-management perspective, but for animal welfare reasons as well. Apart from the limitation of their enclosure size, the animals have a life as close as possible to their natural state, especially in terms of their social structure and activity budget. Others are not comfortable with how little control we are able to exert over the colony, especially in terms of medical management. If prairie dogs are sick or injured, there is often little that can be done for them, as they can be very difficult to trap up, unless you’ve built a trap section into the enclosure and regularly bait them into it. Otherwise, they’ll disappear into the bowels of their exhibit. And a prairie dog that is sick enough or hurt enough that it lets you catch it is probably one that is in pretty bad shape.

I’ve had USDA inspectors who have accepted the former method as the standard technique for managing these animals. I’ve also had one (to be fair, she was pretty new) who wanted us to blow a whistle or something and call all of our prairie dogs out and have them lined up so she could count and inspect them. We just stared at her in complete disbelief.

Of course, even if you catch and treat a prairie dog, then you run into the biggest challenge I’ve found managing this species – introducing new animals (or reintroducing animals that have been separated) for any length of time. The animals can be breathtakingly savage towards one another – it’s like Watership Down meets Lord of the Flies – and a bloodbath can result from introductions. One zoo I know (but did not work at) tried introducing some prairie dogs to an existing colony by placing them in a howdy cage. The original colony prairie dogs literally tried to kill the prairie dogs in the cage by burying them alive. Rodent intros can be dicey for many species, as I mentioned in my post about capybaras, but the subterranean aspect of prairie dog management makes it much, much harder – the new dogs will be chased into burrows, where you can’t intervene to protect them, and from which they are unlikely to emerge alive. One zoo told me a cool trick that they used to merge two prairie dog colonies. They pulled all of the animals to one room, and put Vick’s Vapor Rub on each animal, especially under the noses. Then, they placed the animals back on display one by one, alternating between the two groups (group A, group B, group A…). Not being able to recognize the other prairie dogs as “colony member” vs “stranger” seemed to reset their little brains.

Across the zoos, our prairie dog exhibits were all fairly similar – a low wall or fence (with a strand of hotwire in some cases) around an exhibit of soil, with some deadfall and rocks and a water bowl or lixit, and, the most important feature – a dig barrier that floored the exhibit several feet down to keep the little guys inside. In the one case where I was involved with a new prairie dog exhibit at the start, we pre-dug a few holes to get the animals started on their burrows, then they took it from there. Diet consisted of hay, grain, and chopped produce. Every day, we’d rake out any old hay or other debris. You rarely saw droppings, since prairie dogs often defecate in their burrows.

One of the bigger hassles of managing a prairie dog colony is native wildlife. Wild squirrels love to climb in to steal prairie dog food (as aggressive as prairie dogs are to each other, I’ve never seen one go after a squirrel). Diurnal raptors can be a predator challenge – it seems to be a behavior that some individual hawks get into it. I’ve worked at several zoos where I saw hawks all the time and we never had an issue, and then one zoo where it seemed like the hawks on grounds only ate prairie dogs. Of course, one could argue that having to be constantly vigilant for predators helps replicate natural prairie dog behavior, and they do have their burrows to retreat to after all. Personally, I always wanted to work in a fully enclosed prairie dog exhibit, sort of like a walk-through aviary, with visitors on a slightly elevated boardwalk that took them over the animals. It would be cool to incorporate birds into the exhibit – I’ve never worked with these animals in a mixed-species exhibit.



The prairie dog exhibit that I mentioned that I was present for the building of (and helped build) was at one of the non-AZA zoos; it's depicted in the above picture. It was a former spider monkey island, but the limited space for the monkeys and the leaking problems we were having prompted the owner to repurpose it, and it was decided to do prairie dogs. It was a fairly attractive exhibit, but we failed to consider one thing – if water was leaking from the moat, maybe the concrete bowl that the exhibit was built into wasn’t all that secure after all.

I began to suspect as much the first time I came in to work in the morning and saw a fat little prairie dog puttering down the visitor path, a few yards away from the exhibit. I grabbed it (quickly, because they are bitey little guys) and dropped him back in… but it kept happening over the next few days. I marked the animals with dye as I recaptured them and confirmed that they were different animals each time. At first I thought that the fence was too low, and we spent laborious hours digging out the substrate so it would be taller, but they still kept getting out. On one particularly stressful occasion, we were getting a USDA inspection. I was talking with our inspector, who had her back to the exhibit, about ten feet behind her… and was trying not to stare at the prairie dog that was waddling along directly behind her shoes.

 

[birdsandbats]

Prairie dog escapes could potentially become a big deal - as you mentioned they're resilient animals. We have a wild population here in Wisconsin (they're not a native species here) derived from zoos escapees.

 

[Panda_Fan]

I must say that I'm very much enjoying your thread @Aardwolf !
It's always a thing a look up to every day, and that cheers me up when I'm sad and makes me even happier when I'm happy. It's always fun to read about some of your personal stories, interactions with the animals and opinions about of each of the animals you make "reviews" about.
And it's always interesting to read this post also as someone that wants to work in a zoo some time in the future. It's always very instructive not only to hear about the good things, but also the bad things. When I talk to keeper and veterenarians about their experiences they always omit what difficulties they've had with animals and they're job in general, but you always tell everything, the good and the bad, and it's also very interesting that you worked both for AZA and non-AZA facilities and you make comparasions when you worked with the same species at the two types of institutions.
Making this posts must be very difficult and long so thanks for all the hard work that you're putting in this thread.
Best wishes!

 

[Aardwolf]

@birdsandbats it could have been worse. The original idea the owner had was to put meerkats in that exhibit. (And this is why injurious wildlife laws exist)

@Panda_Fan thank you for the kind words. It’s been a bit of a labor, to be sure, but also fun. I’m in a bit of a dull phase in my zoo career at the moment, so it’s been enjoyable taking some time to look back on favorite species/individuals from the past and reminisce about them. For some of them, so much has already changed in how we care for them that I’m sure a new keeper would look at my posts the way I would look at Crandall’s book – a historical curiosity, interesting but of somewhat limited application to them, except maybe as a lesson on “how NOT to” do something.

I’m glad that it’s been of some interest to the aspiring zoo professionals on here – questions are always welcome, either here or via PM.

On the three previous posts where I've discussed waterfowl - swans, geese and shelgeese, and North American ducks - I've tackled them as groups of related species, rather than as individuals. For today's post, though... well, some birds are just special.

I love waterfowl in all shapes and forms, but I confess a special fondness for the whistling ducks, and especially the spotted whistling duck. This charismatic tree duck historically was one of the rarest of the whistling ducks in American zoos, though it has become considerably more common since becoming a managed program species, and seems to be becoming more common in the private trade as well. I've worked with this species at one AZA, with three birds total. Two of these were a pair that was housed in an exhibit aviary.

The other was Melody.

Melody (unnamed at the time - I gave her that name when she came to our zoo) was a problem bird at the zoo of her birth. She was housed in a large walk-through aviary (as this species often is), but showed an inordinate fondness for walking on the paths, greeting visitors, and playing with their shoes. This isn't species atypical behavior for these ducks - I've always found them to be very confident and outgoing - but this duck was getting excessive to a degree the others weren't, and they needed to find a new home for her. I'd been interested in the idea of having an educational ambassador duck, so I offered to take her, and she was shipped over to us. It was love at first sight.

Love, however, does not equal success.

In her mews, or in one on one training sessions, Melody was a delight. I called her my shoulder duck, as she often perched on my shoulder, whistling happily (the name whistling duck refers not only to their whistles, but to the sound their wings make while they are in flight). She'd happily take mealworms or diced grapes from my hand. But in mixed company, she was very shy and often wouldn't even come out of her crate. Then, I'd bring her back to the mews and, one on one, she'd be back to her charming self. In the end, she became more of a pet than an ambassador.


Do you have any idea how hard it is to take a selfie with a duck on your shoulder?

This was really highlighted to me one very bad winter, when temperatures plunged to new lows for our area. I was scared stiff about poor Melody - what if her heat went out? - and so finagled permission from the Director (who had a soft spot for her as well) to let me bring her home for the nights, at least until the cold was over. I'd walk around my apartment, duck perched on my shoulder, making dinner (keeping her cloaca aimed away from the counter) or folding laundry. At night, she stayed in the spare bathroom, where there was also a partially full tub of water for her to paddle in, though she preferred to perch on the edge. I'm afraid that I can't whistle, so I would hum or sing to her, and she's respond in kind. Our classic duet was the Rubber Ducky song from Sesame Street.

I was heartbroken when a coworker called me on my day off to let me know that Melody had passed, and was currently being carried up to the vet for a necropsy. I asked that coworker to do me a favor before he got there – to remove some of her feathers. These I later placed in a clear glass Christmas ornament and have kept as a reminder of her (year round… though I do also put it on the tree every year).

The exhibit pair was less outgoing than Melody, but still a fun pair of birds to work with. They shared an Australian-themed* exhibit with straw-necked ibis, rosellas, and a tawny frogmouth – about 30 feet long by 20 feet wide, maybe 12 feet tall, with a small pool (we built this exhibit by modifying an older, empty exhibit, and if I had one wish, it’s that we’d made the pool a bit bigger). Whistling ducks are also called tree ducks (the genus name translates to “Tree Swan”) and spotteds may be the most arboreal of the bunch. Sometimes we saw them in the pool, but just as often they’d be perched in branches over our head, peering down curiously at us. Like swans, they are generally monogamous, and it wasn’t uncommon to hear them calling to each other, preening each other, and in generally sticking very close to one another.



This is one of many species of waterfowl which has an outsized reputation for aggression (probably attributable in part to the days when there were very few in captivity, and so a small sample size colored the impressions). I’ve never housed them with other ducks myself, but I know many zoos that have, most of which have been fine, and I prefer to say that they aren’t aggressive, they’re assertive. I think leaving the birds fully-winged and providing lots of perching helps, as it gives these tree ducks a whole level of the exhibit to occupy where they aren’t crossing path with other ducks. They typically pay very little attention to animals of other species (though a friend at one zoo told me that they had to send their spotted whistling ducks away from their rainforest building after the birds wouldn’t stop diving in their piranha tank and chasing the piranhas!).

*Spotted whistling ducks are generally thought of as being from the Philippines, New Guinea, and Indonesia. A few years back, however, they started appearing in northern Australia, having apparently taken the initiative of introducing themselves to a new continent. From a zoo perspective, this was pretty beneficial, as now they could be added to more geographic exhibits

 

[Strathmorezoo]

@birdsandbats it could have been worse. The original idea the owner had was to put meerkats in that exhibit. (And this is why injurious wildlife laws exist)

@Panda_Fan thank you for the kind words. It’s been a bit of a labor, to be sure, but also fun. I’m in a bit of a dull phase in my zoo career at the moment, so it’s been enjoyable taking some time to look back on favorite species/individuals from the past and reminisce about them. For some of them, so much has already changed in how we care for them that I’m sure a new keeper would look at my posts the way I would look at Crandall’s book – a historical curiosity, interesting but of somewhat limited application to them, except maybe as a lesson on “how NOT to” do something.

I’m glad that it’s been of some interest to the aspiring zoo professionals on here – questions are always welcome, either here or via PM.

On the three previous posts where I've discussed waterfowl - swans, geese and shelgeese, and North American ducks - I've tackled them as groups of related species, rather than as individuals. For today's post, though... well, some birds are just special.

I love waterfowl in all shapes and forms, but I confess a special fondness for the whistling ducks, and especially the spotted whistling duck. This charismatic tree duck historically was one of the rarest of the whistling ducks in American zoos, though it has become considerably more common since becoming a managed program species, and seems to be becoming more common in the private trade as well. I've worked with this species at one AZA, with three birds total. Two of these were a pair that was housed in an exhibit aviary.

The other was Melody.

Melody (unnamed at the time - I gave her that name when she came to our zoo) was a problem bird at the zoo of her birth. She was housed in a large walk-through aviary (as this species often is), but showed an inordinate fondness for walking on the paths, greeting visitors, and playing with their shoes. This isn't species atypical behavior for these ducks - I've always found them to be very confident and outgoing - but this duck was getting excessive to a degree the others weren't, and they needed to find a new home for her. I'd been interested in the idea of having an educational ambassador duck, so I offered to take her, and she was shipped over to us. It was love at first sight.

Love, however, does not equal success.

In her mews, or in one on one training sessions, Melody was a delight. I called her my shoulder duck, as she often perched on my shoulder, whistling happily (the name whistling duck refers not only to their whistles, but to the sound their wings make while they are in flight). She'd happily take mealworms or diced grapes from my hand. But in mixed company, she was very shy and often wouldn't even come out of her crate. Then, I'd bring her back to the mews and, one on one, she'd be back to her charming self. In the end, she became more of a pet than an ambassador.

View attachment 779432
Do you have any idea how hard it is to take a selfie with a duck on your shoulder?

This was really highlighted to me one very bad winter, when temperatures plunged to new lows for our area. I was scared stiff about poor Melody - what if her heat went out? - and so finagled permission from the Director (who had a soft spot for her as well) to let me bring her home for the nights, at least until the cold was over. I'd walk around my apartment, duck perched on my shoulder, making dinner (keeping her cloaca aimed away from the counter) or folding laundry. At night, she stayed in the spare bathroom, where there was also a partially full tub of water for her to paddle in, though she preferred to perch on the edge. I'm afraid that I can't whistle, so I would hum or sing to her, and she's respond in kind. Our classic duet was the Rubber Ducky song from Sesame Street.

I was heartbroken when a coworker called me on my day off to let me know that Melody had passed, and was currently being carried up to the vet for a necropsy. I asked that coworker to do me a favor before he got there – to remove some of her feathers. These I later placed in a clear glass Christmas ornament and have kept as a reminder of her (year round… though I do also put it on the tree every year).

The exhibit pair was less outgoing than Melody, but still a fun pair of birds to work with. They shared an Australian-themed* exhibit with straw-necked ibis, rosellas, and a tawny frogmouth – about 30 feet long by 20 feet wide, maybe 12 feet tall, with a small pool (we built this exhibit by modifying an older, empty exhibit, and if I had one wish, it’s that we’d made the pool a bit bigger). Whistling ducks are also called tree ducks (the genus name translates to “Tree Swan”) and spotteds may be the most arboreal of the bunch. Sometimes we saw them in the pool, but just as often they’d be perched in branches over our head, peering down curiously at us. Like swans, they are generally monogamous, and it wasn’t uncommon to hear them calling to each other, preening each other, and in generally sticking very close to one another.

View attachment 779433

This is one of many species of waterfowl which has an outsized reputation for aggression (probably attributable in part to the days when there were very few in captivity, and so a small sample size colored the impressions). I’ve never housed them with other ducks myself, but I know many zoos that have, most of which have been fine, and I prefer to say that they aren’t aggressive, they’re assertive. I think leaving the birds fully-winged and providing lots of perching helps, as it gives these tree ducks a whole level of the exhibit to occupy where they aren’t crossing path with other ducks. They typically pay very little attention to animals of other species (though a friend at one zoo told me that they had to send their spotted whistling ducks away from their rainforest building after the birds wouldn’t stop diving in their piranha tank and chasing the piranhas!).

*Spotted whistling ducks are generally thought of as being from the Philippines, New Guinea, and Indonesia. A few years back, however, they started appearing in northern Australia, having apparently taken the initiative of introducing themselves to a new continent. From a zoo perspective, this was pretty beneficial, as now they could be added to more geographic exhibits

Hi Aardwolf, sorry about Melody, but I've got to ask, what did she die from ?

 

[Aardwolf]

@Strathmorezoo, frustratingly enough… I don’t really know. There were some lesions found on some of her organs which suggested maybe avian tuberculosis, but I’m not certain. That’s actually been one of the biggest sources of frustration I’ve had over the years working with animals. Not knowing what they actually died of. I feel like vets very rarely are able to give a definitive answer, something that says, “Yes, the animal died of this disease, and here are steps we can take or changes to husbandry we can make to address it in the future,” which is what I always really want (that and some reassurance that it wasn’t my fault). Too often, there’s just a partial answer and a nagging doubt.

It’s amazing how you can sometimes work with a species for years and years, and then something happens that completely changes how you see that species. I’ve felt that way about the African gray parrot.

I’ve worked with African grays at two zoos, one AZA, one-non. The AZA bird was an ambassador animal (“is”, I should say – it was twenty years ago that I worked with this animal, but she’s still around), housed off-exhibit in modular Corner’s Unlimited caging, though she often was given the ability to freely roam the entire building. There was an outdoor exercise pen that she had access to in the warmer months, shared on a rotational basis with other birds and mammals that were housed in her building. She was very much the darling of the keepers, and there was more than one staff meeting that I was present for elsewhere in the zoo when I would suddenly notice that she was there, sitting on a perch in the corner, brought along for company.

The non-AZA parrot was an exhibit bird, but she also double-functioned as an ambassador, as many of the birds at that zoo did. During cooler weather, she was kept in a bird cage in the back of the reptile house. In warmer weather, she was in a chain-link cage (about 6’ x 6’ x 6’) out on grounds. In summer she would be there 24/7, in spring and fall we’d move her back in on cold nights. When she was outdoors, she had frequent access to visitors and staff walking by, as well as other animals. In the back of the reptile house, she would be alone for long stretches of time.

Both parents were former pets, surrendered by owners when they were of a young age. Both were of fairly friendly dispositions, solicitous of company and affection from keepers and never trying to bite. At both zoos, the birds were fed Mazuri parrot chow, with produce and nuts (both of those offered more generously at the AZA than the non). At both, enrichment was offered, usually consisting of things that the bird could either climb on or shred with her beak. And, most importantly, at both, the bird was largely alone.

The AZA bird was housed in the vicinity of macaws, the non-AZA in the vicinity of cockatoos, but neither was housed directly with the larger birds (I’d have been more open to the idea of trying with the macaws than the cockatoos – I think the cockatoos would have eaten her alive). The AZA bird got a lot more socialization from keepers, both due to higher staffing levels and different priorities, but both were pretty neurotic birds, with some feather plucking (which was especially problematic for the non-AZA bird, since it made her even less suitable to keep outdoors in cooler weather). One of my good friends, a zoo educator, had a pet African gray, which was likewise neurotic as heck and was frequently seen wearing a cone to prevent her from shredding her feathers. Those experiences, all in the earlier days of my zookeeping career, left me with the impression that African grays were kind of… well, boring.

So boring, it seems, than when I look through my pictures now, it seems like it never occurred to me to take a picture of either bird at either zoo. I can't even remember what the name of the one at the non-AZA was, and I worked with that bird for years.

My Road to Damascus moment came years later (long after I left both of those birds behind) when I was doing an animal transport to Columbus Zoo and, as is my custom, I tried to build myself some time in for walking around and exploring. I don’t think anything I saw that day made a bigger impression on me than the African gray exhibit I saw there. I realized that I had never seen two African gray parrots together before – and here was a flock of them. And they weren’t being presented as pets or ambassadors, but as a wild species. With some of the animals that I call “pet store exotics” – bearded dragons, ball pythons, Russian tortoises, budgerigars, cockatiels, and, yes, African grays – I feel like we sometimes forget that these animals are actually descended from wild animals that live in the wild and do wild animal things – in the case of African grays, live in flocks that fly through the trees, rather than sit on perches in the living room, watching TV.

Columbus Zoo’s exhibit colored not only how I saw African grays in the future, but a variety of other species, and has left me with the feeling that zoos should use their platform and campus to better educate visitors on what the needs of exotic pets under human care should be – not just with messaging and signage, but by example. Maybe show people that this is how an African gray is supposed to live - and if you can’t meet that standard, than maybe that’s not an animal that you should be housing.

Zoos will continue to find themselves with animals that are removed from undesirable pet situations which will pose some behavioral challenges. That’s inevitable. But they can do a better job of trying to meet the needs of those particular individuals. The non-AZA bird was later adopted out to a staff member (no idea how that worked out for either of them in the end). Since leaving the other bird at the AZA zoo, I have since seen her. She’s still not housed with another of her species – the zoo is reluctant to keeping adding African grays, I suspect – but she is frequently howdied with the macaws, and spends all open hours in the company of volunteers and keepers, which act as her flock. She doesn’t seem to shred or pluck anymore, and seems fairly well-adjusted behaviorally, so that bird has had a decent story so far. But I know that there are still a lot of African grays out there which are not being given the chance to properly be parrots.

And, with apologies to everyone following this thread, tomorrow I’ll be taking a day off. It’s been a long few months at work, and with spring in the air and my PTO stacking up, it’s time for my first new zoo trip of the year.

 

[Coelacanth18]

I’ve had USDA inspectors who have accepted the former method as the standard technique for managing these animals. I’ve also had one (to be fair, she was pretty new) who wanted us to blow a whistle or something and call all of our prairie dogs out and have them lined up so she could count and inspect them. We just stared at her in complete disbelief.

I've noticed this in USDA inspection reports myself. There was a particularly long one (for a zoo that I will leave unnamed) that detailed how a prairie dog colony disappeared with no trace. The keepers assumed it was predation and beefed up the exhibit's barriers before introducing a new colony, which then also immediately disappeared. Turns out it was tunnel collapse and most of the prairie dogs were dead or dying underground. It is a terrible situation and I can see how maybe some different decisions could have been made, but I also found myself wondering how avoidable situations like that really are when dealing with animals that more or less live wild and inaccessible like they do.

I’ve worked at several zoos where I saw hawks all the time and we never had an issue, and then one zoo where it seemed like the hawks on grounds only ate prairie dogs.

Sort of reminds me of how people will get resident hawks predating birds at their bird feeders - although with zoo prairie dogs I feel like the obvious solution is just to enclose them with mesh, as countless zoos are now doing with birds? But perhaps easier said than done.

 

[Strathmorezoo]

@Strathmorezoo, frustratingly enough… I don’t really know. There were some lesions found on some of her organs which suggested maybe avian tuberculosis, but I’m not certain. That’s actually been one of the biggest sources of frustration I’ve had over the years working with animals. Not knowing what they actually died of. I feel like vets very rarely are able to give a definitive answer, something that says, “Yes, the animal died of this disease, and here are steps we can take or changes to husbandry we can make to address it in the future,” which is what I always really want (that and some reassurance that it wasn’t my fault). Too often, there’s just a partial answer and a nagging doubt.

It’s amazing how you can sometimes work with a species for years and years, and then something happens that completely changes how you see that species. I’ve felt that way about the African gray parrot.

I’ve worked with African grays at two zoos, one AZA, one-non. The AZA bird was an ambassador animal (“is”, I should say – it was twenty years ago that I worked with this animal, but she’s still around), housed off-exhibit in modular Corner’s Unlimited caging, though she often was given the ability to freely roam the entire building. There was an outdoor exercise pen that she had access to in the warmer months, shared on a rotational basis with other birds and mammals that were housed in her building. She was very much the darling of the keepers, and there was more than one staff meeting that I was present for elsewhere in the zoo when I would suddenly notice that she was there, sitting on a perch in the corner, brought along for company.

The non-AZA parrot was an exhibit bird, but she also double-functioned as an ambassador, as many of the birds at that zoo did. During cooler weather, she was kept in a bird cage in the back of the reptile house. In warmer weather, she was in a chain-link cage (about 6’ x 6’ x 6’) out on grounds. In summer she would be there 24/7, in spring and fall we’d move her back in on cold nights. When she was outdoors, she had frequent access to visitors and staff walking by, as well as other animals. In the back of the reptile house, she would be alone for long stretches of time.

Both parents were former pets, surrendered by owners when they were of a young age. Both were of fairly friendly dispositions, solicitous of company and affection from keepers and never trying to bite. At both zoos, the birds were fed Mazuri parrot chow, with produce and nuts (both of those offered more generously at the AZA than the non). At both, enrichment was offered, usually consisting of things that the bird could either climb on or shred with her beak. And, most importantly, at both, the bird was largely alone.

The AZA bird was housed in the vicinity of macaws, the non-AZA in the vicinity of cockatoos, but neither was housed directly with the larger birds (I’d have been more open to the idea of trying with the macaws than the cockatoos – I think the cockatoos would have eaten her alive). The AZA bird got a lot more socialization from keepers, both due to higher staffing levels and different priorities, but both were pretty neurotic birds, with some feather plucking (which was especially problematic for the non-AZA bird, since it made her even less suitable to keep outdoors in cooler weather). One of my good friends, a zoo educator, had a pet African gray, which was likewise neurotic as heck and was frequently seen wearing a cone to prevent her from shredding her feathers. Those experiences, all in the earlier days of my zookeeping career, left me with the impression that African grays were kind of… well, boring.

So boring, it seems, than when I look through my pictures now, it seems like it never occurred to me to take a picture of either bird at either zoo. I can't even remember what the name of the one at the non-AZA was, and I worked with that bird for years.

My Road to Damascus moment came years later (long after I left both of those birds behind) when I was doing an animal transport to Columbus Zoo and, as is my custom, I tried to build myself some time in for walking around and exploring. I don’t think anything I saw that day made a bigger impression on me than the African gray exhibit I saw there. I realized that I had never seen two African gray parrots together before – and here was a flock of them. And they weren’t being presented as pets or ambassadors, but as a wild species. With some of the animals that I call “pet store exotics” – bearded dragons, ball pythons, Russian tortoises, budgerigars, cockatiels, and, yes, African grays – I feel like we sometimes forget that these animals are actually descended from wild animals that live in the wild and do wild animal things – in the case of African grays, live in flocks that fly through the trees, rather than sit on perches in the living room, watching TV.

Columbus Zoo’s exhibit colored not only how I saw African grays in the future, but a variety of other species, and has left me with the feeling that zoos should use their platform and campus to better educate visitors on what the needs of exotic pets under human care should be – not just with messaging and signage, but by example. Maybe show people that this is how an African gray is supposed to live - and if you can’t meet that standard, than maybe that’s not an animal that you should be housing.

Zoos will continue to find themselves with animals that are removed from undesirable pet situations which will pose some behavioral challenges. That’s inevitable. But they can do a better job of trying to meet the needs of those particular individuals. The non-AZA bird was later adopted out to a staff member (no idea how that worked out for either of them in the end). Since leaving the other bird at the AZA zoo, I have since seen her. She’s still not housed with another of her species – the zoo is reluctant to keeping adding African grays, I suspect – but she is frequently howdied with the macaws, and spends all open hours in the company of volunteers and keepers, which act as her flock. She doesn’t seem to shred or pluck anymore, and seems fairly well-adjusted behaviorally, so that bird has had a decent story so far. But I know that there are still a lot of African grays out there which are not being given the chance to properly be parrots.

And, with apologies to everyone following this thread, tomorrow I’ll be taking a day off. It’s been a long few months at work, and with spring in the air and my PTO stacking up, it’s time for my first new zoo trip of the year.

A similar thing happened when I picked up a dead Crimson Winged Parrot. There was no obvious sign why she died,so I was concerned for her mate. I contacted my vet (who ,fortunately is qualified in exotics) and made arrangements for a pm for the same day . He contacted me in the evening and said " that it was the healthiest dead bird that he had ever seen ".
With regard to zoos being more proactive with educating the visitors on how to properly look after " pets",couldn't agree more, I've been banging on about this for years.
I don't understand why such social animals like parrots are kept on their own, especially by zoos and then to see them in a large flock is fantastic.
Have a well deserved break !

 

[TeaLovingDave]

This morning, the Guardian Spirit of Zoonerdery manifested for a brief and shining moment to bestow His Boto Blessings upon this thread and ordain @Aardwolf as His Emissary amongst the mere mortals whom He protects:



Although He has now departed for another year, leaving only the lingering sound and smell of the Amazon rainforest, the reminder that Baby still watches over us all is a solace in these increasingly turbulent and troubling times!

 

[Aardwolf]

When I first became a reptile keeper after college, I was amazed to find out how many of the species in my new section I’d never seen before – heck, how many I’d never heard of! I immediately set myself the goal of researching each species in my care, one a night, and writing a little fact profile about it for my own education. In many cases, these fact sheets wound up being very short. It amazed me how little was published about some of these animals. One such species was an animal that I grew to be inordinately fond of – the Haitian giant galliwasp.


A cranky Haitian galliwasp, angry at me for having pulled him from the burrow for a photo

I’m not sure why the galliwasps attracted me so much. For one thing, I rarely saw them. They weren’t on exhibit, instead being kept in a series of tubs behind the scenes, filled with woodchips and slabs of bark, which the burrowed under and rarely emerged. Even when they ate (a mix of wet cat food, insects, and chopped rodents), I never saw them, as they seemed to take care to take their diet when no one was around. Nor was it their sparkling personality – the adults were, to a lizard, some of the most bad-tempered, bitey monsters I ever worked with, and deeply resented their monthly weigh in (I later read that in local folklore, they were considered venomous. If a galliwasp bit you, you and the lizard needed to race to the nearest body of water. If you got there first, the lizard would die and you’d be find. If the lizard won, you would drop dead). Nor where they an especially attractive lizard – compared to some of the other galliwasps, they’re kind of drab, being a chocolate color on the back, pale on the underside.

I think it came down to a combination of a few things. For one, that I knew so little about them – when I first pulled one out of its burrow (its mouth attached to my thumb) and examined it for the first time, I thought it was some sort of skink. For another, that there was such an endangered species that I had never heard of. Oh, and the name is fun to say. But mostly, I felt it was because they needed me.

You see, the galliwasps had bred shortly before I got there, and we had an entire rack of babies. And those babies were, seemingly inexplicably, dying.

Looking back as a more seasoned keeper, the signs of metabolic bone disease were obvious – the floppiness, the weakness and eventual disuse of the joints, etc. As a brand new keeper trained to follow instructions to a T and not to deviate, I was at first baffled – what was wrong? – then demoralized – why am I such an awful keeper that my animals are dying? – and then angry – why isn’t anyone doing anything about this? It seemed like the curator and the vets were shrugging it off.

And so, not for the first time in my animal care career… I went rogue.


A young galliwasp displaying its spinal abnormalities. They also presented with red undersides

As today, the main name in Haitian giant galliwasps in AZA was at Nashville Zoo (then still a fairly new zoo), so I nervously tracked down the curator and asked for his advice. He gave me some tips and lots of literature, which is where I eventually tracked down the diagnosis of MBD (up until this time, I’d never encountered MBD myself – I guess that was a testament to all previous reptiles I worked with). It seems that galliwasps, especially when they’re young, have a very strong need for UVB light, far in excess of what one would expect for an animal that spends most of its life underground (I mean, I know plenty of folks who have never provided supplemental UVB for their nocturnal lizards with zero issues, whereas these galliwasps looked like little bits of jerky in the end).

By a very lucky coincidence, one of our adult volunteers was a professor at a nearby university who happened to study light issues in reptiles (which, again, looking back on it is weird – why didn’t he notice it earlier?) I burrowed a very powerful (as in, put your hand under it and you get cancer) UVB light and begin putting each lizard under it for a few minutes a day. I also began heavily supplementing the diet of the little ones with calcium, including spoon-feeding them yogurt with calcium powder mixed in. Sure enough, the lizards which had not yet shown signs of the disease never developed it. The ones that were in the early stages didn’t get any worse. I weighed them all religiously, and, based on the growth data that Nashville sent me, they seemed to be growing ok.

The adult volunteer and I wrote a paper that we wanted to publish, “An Intensive Treatment Regime for Correcting Metabolic Bone Disease in the Haitian Giant Galliwasp, Celestus warreni” (that being the Latin name back then), but the curator balked – largely, I suspect, because it would have looked like he’d been neglecting the animals. To be blunt, I think the problem was that we had way too many animals in that building, and many of them were getting care that was perfunctory. Being the new guy, I was given a lot of these loose-end animals as my section, and as such actually had the time to focus on them.

Why did we even have those galliwasps, I sometimes wondered. We weren’t exhibiting them. No one besides me was particularly interested in them. It seems like they were acquired on a whim, bred out of curiosity, and then forgotten. Such apathy and overlooking of animals is one of the main reasons that AZA now requires annual welfare assessments – it helps make sure that animals are reviewed frequently and have their needs accessed, rather than just being warehoused.

When I visited Nashville for the first time, I took a special delight in going behind the scenes and visiting what was essentially a galliwasp factory. Sure enough, there was ample UVB.

 

[evilmonkey239]

When I first became a reptile keeper after college, I was amazed to find out how many of the species in my new section I’d never seen before – heck, how many I’d never heard of! I immediately set myself the goal of researching each species in my care, one a night, and writing a little fact profile about it for my own education. In many cases, these fact sheets wound up being very short. It amazed me how little was published about some of these animals. One such species was an animal that I grew to be inordinately fond of – the Haitian giant galliwasp.

View attachment 781167
A cranky Haitian galliwasp, angry at me for having pulled him from the burrow for a photo

I’m not sure why the galliwasps attracted me so much. For one thing, I rarely saw them. They weren’t on exhibit, instead being kept in a series of tubs behind the scenes, filled with woodchips and slabs of bark, which the burrowed under and rarely emerged. Even when they ate (a mix of wet cat food, insects, and chopped rodents), I never saw them, as they seemed to take care to take their diet when no one was around. Nor was it their sparkling personality – the adults were, to a lizard, some of the most bad-tempered, bitey monsters I ever worked with, and deeply resented their monthly weigh in (I later read that in local folklore, they were considered venomous. If a galliwasp bit you, you and the lizard needed to race to the nearest body of water. If you got there first, the lizard would die and you’d be find. If the lizard won, you would drop dead). Nor where they an especially attractive lizard – compared to some of the other galliwasps, they’re kind of drab, being a chocolate color on the back, pale on the underside.

I think it came down to a combination of a few things. For one, that I knew so little about them – when I first pulled one out of its burrow (its mouth attached to my thumb) and examined it for the first time, I thought it was some sort of skink. For another, that there was such an endangered species that I had never heard of. Oh, and the name is fun to say. But mostly, I felt it was because they needed me.

You see, the galliwasps had bred shortly before I got there, and we had an entire rack of babies. And those babies were, seemingly inexplicably, dying.

Looking back as a more seasoned keeper, the signs of metabolic bone disease were obvious – the floppiness, the weakness and eventual disuse of the joints, etc. As a brand new keeper trained to follow instructions to a T and not to deviate, I was at first baffled – what was wrong? – then demoralized – why am I such an awful keeper that my animals are dying? – and then angry – why isn’t anyone doing anything about this? It seemed like the curator and the vets were shrugging it off.

And so, not for the first time in my animal care career… I went rogue.

View attachment 781168
A young galliwasp displaying its spinal abnormalities. They also presented with red undersides

As today, the main name in Haitian giant galliwasps in AZA was at Nashville Zoo (then still a fairly new zoo), so I nervously tracked down the curator and asked for his advice. He gave me some tips and lots of literature, which is where I eventually tracked down the diagnosis of MBD (up until this time, I’d never encountered MBD myself – I guess that was a testament to all previous reptiles I worked with). It seems that galliwasps, especially when they’re young, have a very strong need for UVB light, far in excess of what one would expect for an animal that spends most of its life underground (I mean, I know plenty of folks who have never provided supplemental UVB for their nocturnal lizards with zero issues, whereas these galliwasps looked like little bits of jerky in the end).

By a very lucky coincidence, one of our adult volunteers was a professor at a nearby university who happened to study light issues in reptiles (which, again, looking back on it is weird – why didn’t he notice it earlier?) I burrowed a very powerful (as in, put your hand under it and you get cancer) UVB light and begin putting each lizard under it for a few minutes a day. I also began heavily supplementing the diet of the little ones with calcium, including spoon-feeding them yogurt with calcium powder mixed in. Sure enough, the lizards which had not yet shown signs of the disease never developed it. The ones that were in the early stages didn’t get any worse. I weighed them all religiously, and, based on the growth data that Nashville sent me, they seemed to be growing ok.

The adult volunteer and I wrote a paper that we wanted to publish, “An Intensive Treatment Regime for Correcting Metabolic Bone Disease in the Haitian Giant Galliwasp, Celestus warreni” (that being the Latin name back then), but the curator balked – largely, I suspect, because it would have looked like he’d been neglecting the animals. To be blunt, I think the problem was that we had way too many animals in that building, and many of them were getting care that was perfunctory. Being the new guy, I was given a lot of these loose-end animals as my section, and as such actually had the time to focus on them.

Why did we even have those galliwasps, I sometimes wondered. We weren’t exhibiting them. No one besides me was particularly interested in them. It seems like they were acquired on a whim, bred out of curiosity, and then forgotten. Such apathy and overlooking of animals is one of the main reasons that AZA now requires annual welfare assessments – it helps make sure that animals are reviewed frequently and have their needs accessed, rather than just being warehoused.

When I visited Nashville for the first time, I took a special delight in going behind the scenes and visiting what was essentially a galliwasp factory. Sure enough, there was ample UVB.

Never heard of this species before! The name definitely is funny, especially since it’s certainly not a wasp!

 

[Aardwolf]

For today’s post, we’ll talk about the binturong. I worked with this Southeast Asian arboreal carnivore at two non-AZA facilities. I was fairly young when I started working with bints – I’d heard about them, and could have recognized one from a picture, but don’t think I’d ever actually seen (or smelled) one in the flesh before my first day of work.

The first impression that I had of the bints wasn’t the smell – though it is true, they really do smell like buttery movie popcorn, and I’m quite fond of their smell. It was the size. I was expecting an animal about the size of a red panda, a species that I was much more familiar with. Binturongs are much larger, about three to four times the size of a red panda. Their size is accentuated further by their thick, shaggy coats – as summer progressed, and I watched our binturongs lay panting, hanging out of their nest boxes, I wondered why a tropical mammal would have such a thick coat. But back to the size – it certainly made the bints intimidating animals at first, especially since the size of their enclosure, and the lack of holding/shift space, meant that we were in very close quarters. It was especially eerie when you turned around and they were eye-level with you. Thankfully, the male-female pair that I took care of was remarkably docile.



The binturongs were in a corn-crib (silo, Behlen) cage, with a cement floor covered with wood shavings and a tangle of branches and perches. At the back of the cage was an elevated nest box divided into two chambers, with heat lamps warming them in the winter. The binturongs showed a regrettable fondness for pooping in their nestbox, and the nature of bint poop – a wet, sloppy, pudding-like mess – meant that on most days I had to strip and re-bed the nest boxes (the binturongs also sometimes dragged their tails through their mess, and I fussily would try to clean them off). Once, in a fit of pique/inspiration, I started adding a lot of fibrous veggies to their diet, and lo and behold, they began pooping actually logs, instead of the slop. This, of course, freaked the heck out of the longer-term keepers, who saw the new poop shape and were convinced that it was the symptom of some sort of dreadful and likely terminal disease (in my infinite wisdom, I forgot to mention to the other keepers what I was doing)…



The standard binturong diet was two cups of dog chow and some produce per animal every day. I put the chow in bowls (they’d eat it when they wanted it) and sprinkled the produce along the branches of the exhibit so that they’d have to climb around to get the good stuff. Sometimes I’d supplement with a little meat, or hard-boiled egg, and I definitely had a tendency to offer more produce than was strictly allotted (the owner was pretty cheap with produce… heaven knows why, most of it was donated by a local grocery store anyway, so it’s not like he was paying for it).

As many zoochatters have probably noted, binturongs aren’t always the most engaging of zoo animals, and I think that the hot summer days when we were the busiest didn’t always show them to their best advantage, as they liked to stay in their nest boxes. Sometimes, though, they could come out and play, and on those occasions they were a delight. One of my favorite memories of that shabby place came when I was stripping the exhibit one day, using a rake and shovel to take out all of the shavings (we had to do this every time there was a heavy rain, as the shavings became sodden and would get gross). I was raking up a pile and was about to turn and grab the shovel when I heard a banging noise. Turning around, I saw the female binturong holding the shovel. The shovel was standing upright, and she was standing upright behind it, her front paws wrapped around the handle, scooting it around like she was trying to help me clean the exhibit. I tried baiting her (this time with a camera ready) by leaving shovels in there from time to time, but never saw her do it again.

A few weeks later, I heard a commotion at the exhibit and came down to find a slightly alarming – if comical sight. A keeper had been filling up the water trough, when the hose, run in from the outside, fell out, and she stepped outside of the exhibit to put it back in. She left the door open (there was keeper area), assuming that the binturongs would stay put. They did not. When I got there, she was chasing one of the bints in a circle around the outside perimeter of the cage. Granted, binturongs don’t run very fast, but this keeper was a very short, stocky lady, and she wasn’t running any faster herself. I stood there for two or three minutes, slack jawed, as they continuously ran the same circuit, staying an equal distance apart, before I shook myself out of the fun and came down to help.

Our pair was a prolific one, and periodically had babies. My first year there they had twins, one of which did not survive, the other was pulled to be an ambassador.

That young bint, a male we called Bailey, and I went on together to a second non-AZA zoo.


Bailey in the nest box, not long after birth.

There, he was our only binturong, living in a wood-and-wire enclosure. It was about the size and shape of the exhibit at the old zoo, but at least had grass and dirt for substrate, so I didn’t have to strip it all the time (I don’t know how much that mattered to this guy – they seldom came to the exhibit floor).

I had helped hand-raise this bint at our previous zoo (bottle fed on Esbilac, which I also have used on baby coati and otter), and he was still a young, half-grown animal at this zoo. Let me tell you now, a young binturong is a very different critter than an adult. Whereas they were slow and sleepy, he was an absolute fireball, like a puppy that had a perpetual IV of pure caffeine pumping into him. From the second he saw me every day, he wanted to play, racing up my pant legs (I soon took to wearing long pants, even in the summer), jumping from branches onto my shoulders, and sitting on my head, with his tail wrapped right under my nose so I would definitely smell the popcorn scent (and whatever poop he’d dragged in through). Baby bints can play rough, and those claws leave marks on a keeper. This animal also, regrettably, was something of a biter – I attribute this to some of the keepers at our initial zoo who, knowing that the binturong would be leaving them soon, saw no reason to discourage the play bites when he would mouth them innocently.



I frequently took Bailey for walks around the zoo, which tended to turn into keeper chats. I’d plop him on a fence railing, and we’d walk along, stopping to admire the various exhibits or say hi to guests, who I would sometimes let pet him if I was sure I could keep all of his sharp parts occupied. On these walks, he didn’t wear a harness – instead, I used his prehensile tail as a leash, with me holding on to him, and him holding on to me in equal parts.

As Bailey aged, he did slow down a bit and become more like his parents, serene, more nocturnal, and I did miss his playfulness as he settled into adulthood. I did not miss having to use what little disposable income I had on new pants to replace the ones he tore up constantly.

I feel like I don’t often see binturongs in AZA zoos, and when I do, they’re usually ambassadors rather than exhibit animals (a challenge that this SSP, along with the SSP of other popular ambassador animals, has had is getting zoos to be willing to breed animals, not just house singletons for education programs). I admit, they aren’t always the most charismatic of exhibit animals – but like many other species, when you get to know them one-on-one, they can be remarkably different creatures than what you experience from the other side of the railing.

 

[pachyderm pro]

For today’s post, we’ll talk about the binturong. I worked with this Southeast Asian arboreal carnivore at two non-AZA facilities. I was fairly young when I started working with bints – I’d heard about them, and could have recognized one from a picture, but don’t think I’d ever actually seen (or smelled) one in the flesh before my first day of work.

The first impression that I had of the bints wasn’t the smell – though it is true, they really do smell like buttery movie popcorn, and I’m quite fond of their smell. It was the size. I was expecting an animal about the size of a red panda, a species that I was much more familiar with. Binturongs are much larger, about three to four times the size of a red panda. Their size is accentuated further by their thick, shaggy coats – as summer progressed, and I watched our binturongs lay panting, hanging out of their nest boxes, I wondered why a tropical mammal would have such a thick coat. But back to the size – it certainly made the bints intimidating animals at first, especially since the size of their enclosure, and the lack of holding/shift space, meant that we were in very close quarters. It was especially eerie when you turned around and they were eye-level with you. Thankfully, the male-female pair that I took care of was remarkably docile.

View attachment 781540

The binturongs were in a corn-crib (silo, Behlen) cage, with a cement floor covered with wood shavings and a tangle of branches and perches. At the back of the cage was an elevated nest box divided into two chambers, with heat lamps warming them in the winter. The binturongs showed a regrettable fondness for pooping in their nestbox, and the nature of bint poop – a wet, sloppy, pudding-like mess – meant that on most days I had to strip and re-bed the nest boxes (the binturongs also sometimes dragged their tails through their mess, and I fussily would try to clean them off). Once, in a fit of pique/inspiration, I started adding a lot of fibrous veggies to their diet, and lo and behold, they began pooping actually logs, instead of the slop. This, of course, freaked the heck out of the longer-term keepers, who saw the new poop shape and were convinced that it was the symptom of some sort of dreadful and likely terminal disease (in my infinite wisdom, I forgot to mention to the other keepers what I was doing)…

View attachment 781539

The standard binturong diet was two cups of dog chow and some produce per animal every day. I put the chow in bowls (they’d eat it when they wanted it) and sprinkled the produce along the branches of the exhibit so that they’d have to climb around to get the good stuff. Sometimes I’d supplement with a little meat, or hard-boiled egg, and I definitely had a tendency to offer more produce than was strictly allotted (the owner was pretty cheap with produce… heaven knows why, most of it was donated by a local grocery store anyway, so it’s not like he was paying for it).

As many zoochatters have probably noted, binturongs aren’t always the most engaging of zoo animals, and I think that the hot summer days when we were the busiest didn’t always show them to their best advantage, as they liked to stay in their nest boxes. Sometimes, though, they could come out and play, and on those occasions they were a delight. One of my favorite memories of that shabby place came when I was stripping the exhibit one day, using a rake and shovel to take out all of the shavings (we had to do this every time there was a heavy rain, as the shavings became sodden and would get gross). I was raking up a pile and was about to turn and grab the shovel when I heard a banging noise. Turning around, I saw the female binturong holding the shovel. The shovel was standing upright, and she was standing upright behind it, her front paws wrapped around the handle, scooting it around like she was trying to help me clean the exhibit. I tried baiting her (this time with a camera ready) by leaving shovels in there from time to time, but never saw her do it again.

A few weeks later, I heard a commotion at the exhibit and came down to find a slightly alarming – if comical sight. A keeper had been filling up the water trough, when the hose, run in from the outside, fell out, and she stepped outside of the exhibit to put it back in. She left the door open (there was keeper area), assuming that the binturongs would stay put. They did not. When I got there, she was chasing one of the bints in a circle around the outside perimeter of the cage. Granted, binturongs don’t run very fast, but this keeper was a very short, stocky lady, and she wasn’t running any faster herself. I stood there for two or three minutes, slack jawed, as they continuously ran the same circuit, staying an equal distance apart, before I shook myself out of the fun and came down to help.

Our pair was a prolific one, and periodically had babies. My first year there they had twins, one of which did not survive, the other was pulled to be an ambassador.

That young bint, a male we called Bailey, and I went on together to a second non-AZA zoo.

View attachment 781537
Bailey in the nest box, not long after birth.

There, he was our only binturong, living in a wood-and-wire enclosure. It was about the size and shape of the exhibit at the old zoo, but at least had grass and dirt for substrate, so I didn’t have to strip it all the time (I don’t know how much that mattered to this guy – they seldom came to the exhibit floor).

I had helped hand-raise this bint at our previous zoo (bottle fed on Esbilac, which I also have used on baby coati and otter), and he was still a young, half-grown animal at this zoo. Let me tell you now, a young binturong is a very different critter than an adult. Whereas they were slow and sleepy, he was an absolute fireball, like a puppy that had a perpetual IV of pure caffeine pumping into him. From the second he saw me every day, he wanted to play, racing up my pant legs (I soon took to wearing long pants, even in the summer), jumping from branches onto my shoulders, and sitting on my head, with his tail wrapped right under my nose so I would definitely smell the popcorn scent (and whatever poop he’d dragged in through). Baby bints can play rough, and those claws leave marks on a keeper. This animal also, regrettably, was something of a biter – I attribute this to some of the keepers at our initial zoo who, knowing that the binturong would be leaving them soon, saw no reason to discourage the play bites when he would mouth them innocently.

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I frequently took Bailey for walks around the zoo, which tended to turn into keeper chats. I’d plop him on a fence railing, and we’d walk along, stopping to admire the various exhibits or say hi to guests, who I would sometimes let pet him if I was sure I could keep all of his sharp parts occupied. On these walks, he didn’t wear a harness – instead, I used his prehensile tail as a leash, with me holding on to him, and him holding on to me in equal parts.

As Bailey aged, he did slow down a bit and become more like his parents, serene, more nocturnal, and I did miss his playfulness as he settled into adulthood. I did not miss having to use what little disposable income I had on new pants to replace the ones he tore up constantly.

I feel like I don’t often see binturongs in AZA zoos, and when I do, they’re usually ambassadors rather than exhibit animals (a challenge that this SSP, along with the SSP of other popular ambassador animals, has had is getting zoos to be willing to breed animals, not just house singletons for education programs). I admit, they aren’t always the most charismatic of exhibit animals – but like many other species, when you get to know them one-on-one, they can be remarkably different creatures than what you experience from the other side of the railing.

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Another terrific post! Reading this made me realize I've only seen an active exhibited (non-ambassador) binturong at one zoo ever -- my local zoo which I've visited countless times. Even then I seldom see any action despite them being kept in a semi-nocturnal enclosure. When I do however, it's a delight, especially recently when I saw a recently born pair of binti cubs wrestling with their parents right by the visitor area. Catch them at the right time and they can be an incredibly engaging species.

How did you feel about pulling younger animals to be used as ambassadors? No denying that bintis make excellent ambassador animals. I've seen them effectively utilized in presentations at several other zoos that led to great audience reception. However, there's been discourse recently questing the practice of ambassador animals and the kind of messaging it sends to the public. Binturongs being largely nocturnal in nature is another element to factor in. I've also been wondering the same thing about aardvarks for the same reasons.