A Zoo Man's Notebook, 2025

[Aardwolf]

While not actually wild animals, domestic camels – both dromedaries and domestic Bactrians – are among the most common staple animals in non-AZA zoos – I’ve worked with dromedaries in three non-AZA zoos, Bactrians in two (and a little volunteer experience at an AZA zoo). I think most visitors assume that they are actually a wild species (a belief that sometimes extends to other “exotic” domestics). While not, perhaps, the most exciting animals for zoo enthusiasts, these ungulates are absolutely beloved by visitors, who are impressed with their large size (to this day, I’m still impressed whenever I’m right next to a camel), outgoing personality, and unique adaptations. Combine that with their overall hardiness and general availability, and it’s easy to see why so many zoo owners adore them.

The enclosures for camels have varied widely across the zoos. My first was a lone female dromedary, kept in a large, grassy paddock with a stable at one end. The yard was long and thin, and I would make a practice of cleaning at one end, at which time she would slowly start meandering towards me – and then I’d leave right before she reached me. There was something about that camel I didn’t trust, especially in tight quarters. At a second non-AZA zoo, I was responsible for handrearing both dromedary and Bactrian calves, which were kept in a petting kraal along with pygmy goats and whatever other ungulates I was raising at the time (it was here that I was also raising the baby Arabian oryx and addra gazelle). The camels were among the easiest of animals to handraise – unlike many of the llamas I raised, they always seemed hungry and would eagerly slurp down their bottles with minimal mess and fuss. As they grew, they would be transferred to the drive through safari portion of the park. By that point, I was usually glad to see them go – the calves were extremely affectionate and enthusiastic, and as they got bigger, when their hooves and legs went flying in each direction it was enough to knock me several yards back.


Mother and calf dromedary

Calves were raised on lamb replacer, then switched to calf manna, then moved to the adult diet of hay and grain. Large blocks of salt and minerals were also provided, which the camels would break apart with their large teeth.

The other camels I worked with – individuals of both species – were in a large, mixed hoofstock paddock, one which I’ve described with other species on this thread, such as bison and eland. They were the undisputed masters of that yard, easily intimidating the other species, even such formidable animals as zebras and Watusi cattle, and dominating the public feedings (I did have one incident of a camel being horned in the chest by one of the antelope – we never figured out which one – but it healed and recovered). Eventually, the camels got to be too much – too pushy, too assertive, and too inclined to try and push their way out of the gates when we drove the wagons in and out, more than once breaching into the zoo proper. After deciding enough was enough, we constructed a separate (but still large) paddock for them in the center of the main field, right along the wagon road. Then, we could drive the visitors right up to the camels, but leave them behind when we’d (and they’d) had enough.

The drought tolerance of camels is of the more exaggerated features of animal care – they should always be kept well-watered, and are not nearly as thirst-proof as some folks would believe (I mention this specifically because I caught some younger keepers skipping on watering the camels on busy days because they’d assumed the camels would be fine). In truth, the big beasts can drink – I remember trying to fill the 100-gallon trough for a large Bactrian camel with a hose as he was drinking, and realizing that, even with the hose going full blast, he was draining the trough faster than I was filling it. As one might expect from a species that spends a lot of time in the desert, the camels seemed to enjoy it when it rained, provided it wasn’t too powerful of a deluge.



One of the most amusing parts of camel care was watching the Bactrians shed their winter coats in the spring and summer. On some days, they would seem particularly wretched, overheating under their coats but unwilling to accept our help in pulling fur off. When it did come off, it was in big sheets, which were useful for enrichment – or for pranks with other keepers. They looked so dramatically different in the summer – so much sleeker – that it was hard to believe that they were the same animals. Another weird sight – this one more unnerving than amusing, would be during rut, when our bull camels would expel their dulla, the large, pink throat organ, which made it look like the camel was regurgitating its internal organs.

Even without the shaggy winter coats of their cousins, the dromedaries proved tolerant of cold weather, though they always had a barn to retreat to for shelter.

The camels had a lot of personality towards their keepers, often affectionate, but also frequently testing us, pushing us, trying to see what they could get away with – especially for new keepers. They had an unerring instinct for who they could intimidate and who they couldn’t. They also had an uncanny ability to get into trouble, mostly focused on getting into things that they shouldn’t. On keeper parked their John Deere gator too close to the camel fence one day – and when they turned around, the entire front seat had been ripped open, and one of the dromedaries was walking around with an enormous wad of foam stuffing in its mouth, which we frantically worked to recover. A few of us would try to ride the camels on occasion with what I can only describe as mixed (and usually painful) results.

A question I’ve pondered from time to time – du camels really belong in zoos? I’ve decided that the answer is “depends.” If we’re agreed that the primary goal of the zoo is conservation, then probably not. These aren’t wild species, despite what visitors may think. A paddock of dromedaries, and the resources that they consume, could be used for other desert ungulates of much greater conservation value. If the feeling is that zoos are about education and inspiring visitors to care about wildlife, then yes, camels – and other domestics – are worth their considerable weight in gold. They possess many extraordinary adaptations, they have a compelling historical story about humans and animals in the deserts of the world, and their engaging personalities and willingness to interact with people make them much more compelling exhibit animals to the average visitor than, say, your average gazelle. So there’s no right or wrong answer, but a question of priority and perspective.

 

[Randomname0183]

This has been a great thread so far! It is very insightful seeing a keeper's perspective of working with such a wide range of animals, and does give me an idea of what it's really like, better so now I'm in the process of choosing between going for zoology or animal management in uni. If only one could choose both at once, but may well go for it as a post-grad, it's too soon to know.

Looking forward to seeing what else is to come!

 

[Strathmorezoo]

While not actually wild animals, domestic camels – both dromedaries and domestic Bactrians – are among the most common staple animals in non-AZA zoos – I’ve worked with dromedaries in three non-AZA zoos, Bactrians in two (and a little volunteer experience at an AZA zoo). I think most visitors assume that they are actually a wild species (a belief that sometimes extends to other “exotic” domestics). While not, perhaps, the most exciting animals for zoo enthusiasts, these ungulates are absolutely beloved by visitors, who are impressed with their large size (to this day, I’m still impressed whenever I’m right next to a camel), outgoing personality, and unique adaptations. Combine that with their overall hardiness and general availability, and it’s easy to see why so many zoo owners adore them.

The enclosures for camels have varied widely across the zoos. My first was a lone female dromedary, kept in a large, grassy paddock with a stable at one end. The yard was long and thin, and I would make a practice of cleaning at one end, at which time she would slowly start meandering towards me – and then I’d leave right before she reached me. There was something about that camel I didn’t trust, especially in tight quarters. At a second non-AZA zoo, I was responsible for handrearing both dromedary and Bactrian calves, which were kept in a petting kraal along with pygmy goats and whatever other ungulates I was raising at the time (it was here that I was also raising the baby Arabian oryx and addra gazelle). The camels were among the easiest of animals to handraise – unlike many of the llamas I raised, they always seemed hungry and would eagerly slurp down their bottles with minimal mess and fuss. As they grew, they would be transferred to the drive through safari portion of the park. By that point, I was usually glad to see them go – the calves were extremely affectionate and enthusiastic, and as they got bigger, when their hooves and legs went flying in each direction it was enough to knock me several yards back.

View attachment 803171
Mother and calf dromedary

Calves were raised on lamb replacer, then switched to calf manna, then moved to the adult diet of hay and grain. Large blocks of salt and minerals were also provided, which the camels would break apart with their large teeth.

The other camels I worked with – individuals of both species – were in a large, mixed hoofstock paddock, one which I’ve described with other species on this thread, such as bison and eland. They were the undisputed masters of that yard, easily intimidating the other species, even such formidable animals as zebras and Watusi cattle, and dominating the public feedings (I did have one incident of a camel being horned in the chest by one of the antelope – we never figured out which one – but it healed and recovered). Eventually, the camels got to be too much – too pushy, too assertive, and too inclined to try and push their way out of the gates when we drove the wagons in and out, more than once breaching into the zoo proper. After deciding enough was enough, we constructed a separate (but still large) paddock for them in the center of the main field, right along the wagon road. Then, we could drive the visitors right up to the camels, but leave them behind when we’d (and they’d) had enough.

The drought tolerance of camels is of the more exaggerated features of animal care – they should always be kept well-watered, and are not nearly as thirst-proof as some folks would believe (I mention this specifically because I caught some younger keepers skipping on watering the camels on busy days because they’d assumed the camels would be fine). In truth, the big beasts can drink – I remember trying to fill the 100-gallon trough for a large Bactrian camel with a hose as he was drinking, and realizing that, even with the hose going full blast, he was draining the trough faster than I was filling it. As one might expect from a species that spends a lot of time in the desert, the camels seemed to enjoy it when it rained, provided it wasn’t too powerful of a deluge.

View attachment 803172

One of the most amusing parts of camel care was watching the Bactrians shed their winter coats in the spring and summer. On some days, they would seem particularly wretched, overheating under their coats but unwilling to accept our help in pulling fur off. When it did come off, it was in big sheets, which were useful for enrichment – or for pranks with other keepers. They looked so dramatically different in the summer – so much sleeker – that it was hard to believe that they were the same animals. Another weird sight – this one more unnerving than amusing, would be during rut, when our bull camels would expel their dulla, the large, pink throat organ, which made it look like the camel was regurgitating its internal organs.

Even without the shaggy winter coats of their cousins, the dromedaries proved tolerant of cold weather, though they always had a barn to retreat to for shelter.

The camels had a lot of personality towards their keepers, often affectionate, but also frequently testing us, pushing us, trying to see what they could get away with – especially for new keepers. They had an unerring instinct for who they could intimidate and who they couldn’t. They also had an uncanny ability to get into trouble, mostly focused on getting into things that they shouldn’t. On keeper parked their John Deere gator too close to the camel fence one day – and when they turned around, the entire front seat had been ripped open, and one of the dromedaries was walking around with an enormous wad of foam stuffing in its mouth, which we frantically worked to recover. A few of us would try to ride the camels on occasion with what I can only describe as mixed (and usually painful) results.

A question I’ve pondered from time to time – du camels really belong in zoos? I’ve decided that the answer is “depends.” If we’re agreed that the primary goal of the zoo is conservation, then probably not. These aren’t wild species, despite what visitors may think. A paddock of dromedaries, and the resources that they consume, could be used for other desert ungulates of much greater conservation value. If the feeling is that zoos are about education and inspiring visitors to care about wildlife, then yes, camels – and other domestics – are worth their considerable weight in gold. They possess many extraordinary adaptations, they have a compelling historical story about humans and animals in the deserts of the world, and their engaging personalities and willingness to interact with people make them much more compelling exhibit animals to the average visitor than, say, your average gazelle. So there’s no right or wrong answer, but a question of priority and perspective.

Hi Aardwolf, I can also testify to the strength of Bactrian camels, during an amusing incident. Myself and another bird keeper noticed a woman with two young children outside the camels enclosure, one of the children was having a tantrum and decided to throw her hat into the enclosure. My colleague who was a big lad, said that he would climb over the fence and retrieve it. As the mother was very attractive he climbed out of bravado, more than stopping the animals eating the dammed hat. So as he picked up the hat, the male camel came bounding over, grabbed him by the shoulder, lifted him up and preceeded to shake like he was a rag doll. Myself and the mother couldn't help ourselves and burst out laughing. The camel released his grip and my poor friend went flying, ending up face down in camels dung, which only increased our laughing. My colleague picked himself and his ego up and managed to climb back over the fence and handed the hat back to the mother, who between giggles, thanked him. I don’t think he ever heard the last of it.

 

[Wisp O' Mist]

They had an unerring instinct for who they could intimidate and who they couldn’t.

Reminds me of a horse I knew.

 

[Mickey]

This has been a great thread so far! It is very insightful seeing a keeper's perspective of working with such a wide range of animals, and does give me an idea of what it's really like, better so now I'm in the process of choosing between going for zoology or animal management in uni. If only one could choose both at once, but may well go for it as a post-grad, it's too soon to know.

Looking forward to seeing what else is to come!

Do you not have the possibility to do 2 Degrees at the same time in the UK?
In Italy it's a recent addition, but very useful for people who want to cut down on time for formation on similar/related subjects, and it comes with uni tax reductions as well.

 

[Randomname0183]

Do you not have the possibility to do 2 Degrees at the same time in the UK?
In Italy it's a recent addition, but very useful for people who want to cut down on time for formation on similar/related subjects, and it comes with uni tax reductions as well.

Not to derail the thread, but I believe not, though I have looked at some overseas alternatives passingly.

 

[Aardwolf]

Moving on from the camels, we come to their South American relatives. I have worked with llamas at four zoos (three non-AZA, one AZA), alpacas at two (one AZA, one non-AZA), and guanaco at two (also one AZA, one non-AZA). In many ways, their care is fairly similar to the camels, especially in terms of enclosures and diets, so I’ll mostly be talking about things that stood out for these species.

It is scientifically proven that it is impossible for a zookeeper to stand in front of a camelid exhibit for any length of time on a busy day and NOT get 500 questions that are all focused on spit. Will they spit on the visitors, will they spit on me, how far can they spit, etc. I’ve seen visitors, including adults, literally turn and run at the sight of a llama in a paddock, still thirty feet away from the visitor and separated by two fences. I’ve had to assure them that camelids spit when they are upset, and that it’s pretty hard to make a camelid upset enough to spit when you’re that far away.



The truth is – and I always feel like I’m letting visitors down when I say this – never, in a career that has, at times, seemed like my main activity every day was upsetting camelids, have I ever been spat upon – or even at. I’ve wrestled camels onto trailers, tried forcing recalcitrant crias to take their bottles, snuck up on animals to give shots, and tackled alpacas to the ground so they could be tied up and shorn – never spat on. Actually, when raising baby camelids, one of my favorite memories is usually the moment when I come in one morning and find them walking around with their mouth open, a look of disgust upon their face. That’s the look that tells me that the youngster just spat for the first time, and is severely displeased with the foul taste in its mouth.

I suspect most ZooChatters will be more interested in the one wild species, the guanaco, over the two domestics. The guanacos at the non-AZA zoo were kept in a large, safari paddock with other ungulates, as well as ratites. It was a breeding herd, and the male was one of the most savage animals I’ve known. Shortly after we obtained him, I ran to tell the zoo owner that I’d just watched him absolutely destroy a fallow deer fawn the male had come across. “Oh good, he’s vicious,” was the reply of the owner. “That means he should be a good breeder.” And sure enough, he was a good breeder…

Years before I worked at my second guanaco facility, the AZA zoo, a male guanaco there literally tore out the bicep of a keeper who worked there, requiring surgery. What made this especially farcical was that this keeper was only working at this zoo because he was afraid of animals, and his psychiatrist thought it would be good for him to get some exposure (this was way back in the day). I can’t imagine this experience improved his feelings towards animals.

The guanacos at the AZA zoo were mixed with rhea and capybara, with macaws on perches in the exhibit. Unlike the experiences in the safari park, I never saw any aggression directed towards any of these species. As the herd gradually diminished in size, and new animals proved harder to find, llamas were added for companionship, until they eventually took over the exhibit. It’s a bitter pill for a zoo lover to swallow, but visitors, given the choice, will always prefer llamas over guanacos. Not only are the former sweeter and friendlier, but they also have the visitor appeal of coming in a variety of colors and patterns, compared to the uniform tan of the guanaco.



Of all of the camelids, I’ve found alpacas to be the most stressful to deal with. True, they tend to be very good natured, sweet animals – but that doesn’t excuse that fleece. Unlike our llamas, the alpacas needed to be shorn yearly, a process which we did ourselves. First, we had to keep them penned up for a day or so prior to sheering to keep their fleeces dry (there was a creek alongside their exhibit and we didn’t want them to get wet in it before sheering). Then, we’d take them out of their corral, one at a time, bring them to the ground over a tarp, tie them to two stakes, and sheer them as quickly as we could. They tended to scream and squeal while going down (it was best practice to have a volunteer or keeper standing by to talk to the public and let them know what was going on), but once the sheering actually started they tended to just go limp until we were down. Sometimes the sheers would come across an entire pine cone in their fleece, or a pocket of packed dirt which would explode when the sheers hit it, making a giant dust cloud. The fleece was generally too dirty (and poorly shorn, we were amateurs) for any use in weaving, but it had enrichment potential (many zoos do bring in professionals to do their alpacas and sheep). I think my favorite part of the sheering was always the slightly curious, if bored, look on the faces of the other alpacas as we sheered their compatriots, it was like they were thinking “Well, I’m glad that’s not going to happen to me…” until it was their turn.

Timing of the sheering was very tricky every year. We wanted to do it before it got too hot, but not if there would still be cold nights ahead. In some cases, after sheering alpacas, we would have to give them horse blankets on unexpectedly cold nights. There are few things sillier looking than a shorn alpaca - their long legs and necks and ungainly movements always put me in the mind of a marionette.



Another fun note about the alpacas - because of the aforementioned creek, their exhibit tended to flood in severe rainy weather. When that happened, we would simply close the zoo and let the alpacas loose into the rest of the zoo, where they could seek higher ground. Then, when the waters receded, we'd use a bucket of grain to lure them back into their enclosure so that we could reopen the zoo.

Of all of the animals I’ve hand-raised over the course of my career, I’d say about 75% were llamas. Maybe it had something to do with the quantity of animals (about 100) we had at one facility, maybe it’s just that, like many domestic species, their awful mothers. What made llamas uniquely frustrating to bottle feed was their long necks, which twisted around like pythons and you would try to get the bottle in their mouth (and then have to spend several minutes washing their faces with warm water to get all of the milk residue off so it didn’t get crusty and nasty). I was always so happy when the day came when a llama was weaned and we could stop these wrestling sessions. As bratty as they were with the bottles, the llamas my team reared maintained strong levels of affection for their keepers. Even after they were returned to the main safari, if we came by to visit, they would immediately gallop up to us, making their curious humming noises, pressing their faces into ours, and nuzzling us all over.

 

[Aardwolf]

For today’s post, we look at the pretty but poisonous dart frogs and mantellas! I’ve worked with several frogs of the genera Dendrobates, Phyllobates, and Mantella over the course of my career, split between two AZA zoos.

​

Public life and private life was very different for these frogs. On exhibit, they had large, lush, well-planted exhibits. The blue poison dart frogs that I worked with, for example (at the time they were considered a full species, now most often considered a color morph of D. tinctorius - but whatever, to me they’ll always be my archetypal PDF) lived in an exhibit in our reptile house lobby, about 4’ x 4’ x 4’, shared with emerald tree boas and lemur tree frogs. There was a small water feature, lots of furniture, live plants, mist, the works. Off exhibit, the frogs were in 10- or 20- gallon tanks with gravel substrate (paper towels for sick or quarantine frogs, which needed to checked and cleaned more often). Each tank housing a pair or small group also had one or two halves of coconut shells, which were hollowed out and then had little doorways cut into them. The mantilla exhibit wasn’t as large as the dart frog exhibit – maybe half to a third of the size (probably explained by the fact that they weren’t sharing space with a largish snake), but was still larger than the off-exhibit holding space, to say nothing of more complex.

I suspect that it is the bright coloration of PDFs and mantellas which lets them work in proportionately larger exhibits, as they can be much easier for keepers to find and monitor than they would be if they were less vibrantly colored (source: how long it took me to find the lemur frogs in that exhibit on the infrequent occasions that they moved).

As I’m sure many of the folks on this forum now, the poison in the skins of dart frogs (and mantellas) isn’t inherent, but comes from the bodies of the insects that they eat in the wild, and as such captive animals are essentially harmless – not that this is an invitation to go licking them (even forgetting the poison, it’s best not to handle them – they’re just so small and delicate). Even wild-caught frogs generally lose their toxins over time in human care. The standard zoo diet is flightless fruit flies, which we cultured in vinegary-smelling jars in the back of the reptile house for this purpose. They can eat crickets too, but they have to be of the appropriate size, which we always seemed to run out of. Frogs can generally be maintained in a moist environment without an actual water bowl – just misting. If you do provide water, it should be conditioned to remove chemicals – we had an RO filter that all water for our amphibians ran through. Some small zoos with small set ups just buy jugs of distilled water.

Both groups of frogs can be bred fairly reliably in zoos, and we bred several species. Like many tropical species, they can breed year round, though some seasonality has been reported, which keepers can manipulate using misting and feeding levels (but make sure to bring things back to “normal” at some point, give her a break!). We typically removed eggs laid on exhibit to a behind-the-scenes area for rearing, but honestly a much better approach is to just have a single-sex group on exhibit and only breed behind-the-scenes – a large, chaotic environment with multiple species is a stressful place for a keeper to track tadpoles and morphlets. It also makes it a lot easier to cohab several species of PDF without worries of hybridization - and there are few sights in a zoo herp house more appealing than an exhibit literally dripping ith brightly colored frogs of all colors. One of the trickier tasks I recall was keeping water quality decent for the tadpoles as they voraciously fed – live plants in the water will help with filtration.

​

It was when I was working at my second AZA zoo that I made a discovery that majorly impacted how I looked at frogs, toads, and salamanders in zoos. Being a good reptile keeper does not necessarily make you well-suited to being an amphibian keeper. In fact, it seemed that most of the reptile keepers I worked with were actually awful at it. Amphibians are just so much more delicate than many reptiles with their abiotic requirements – temperature, humidity, chemical exposure. They also do not respond as well to handling, which was in contrast with the rough-and-tumble, wrangle-the-snake-or-croc energy that seemed to exude from the rest of our team (I couldn’t help but notice that the one woman on our team was the amphibian keeper). The guys could just be so careless – not paying attention and closing doors on frogs, or forgetting to mist amphibians for her on her off-days, not matter how many times she reminded them (I started to notice her popping in on days when she wasn’t scheduled to do it herself). Which isn’t to say that there are no good male amphibian keepers – there are plenty of them. This place just wasn’t a culture that encouraged that.

 

[Aardwolf]

So far in this thread, we’ve talked about a variety of North American raptors – various owls, falcons, the accipiters – and I was going to write a post about the Buteo as well. I’ve worked with three species – the omnipresent red-tail, its woodland and marsh counterpart, the red-shoulder, and the diminutive broad-wing – but thought that to much of that post would just be cross-referencing the other raptors. Then, I remembered there was one other North American hawk that I worked with, one that is in many ways unique from the others. That is the Harris’s hawk, sometimes called the baywing.

(I was trying to figure out where to put my single northern harrier as well, before deciding that particular bird just didn't have any good stories or lessons attached to it...)

​

Whereas the vast majority of the birds that I worked with were rehab, nonreleasable birds, none of the Harris’s hawks that I worked with at two AZA facilities, and one raptor rescue center, were not. Nor were they wild born… nor were they even native to the region which I was working out of. All were captive-bred birds, previously (or, in the case of the raptor center, still) used for falconry. Harris’s hawks are among the most popular of falconry birds – in fact, I’ve heard some falconers say that they are too easy, and discourage novices in the field from starting with the species, because they’re too forgiving of bad habits and bad training that need to be improved. The reason for this is largely due to the unique social life of Parabuteo – they are social, pack hunters, living in family groups, and when you’re used to hunting with several other birds, it doesn’t take an enormous stretch of imagination to hunt with a human and a pack of hounds.

Much of the care with the various Harris’s hawks was the same as the other hawks – diet, enclosures, basic husbandry parameters. They really differed the most in their training. Unlike the rehab birds, the HAHAs were all fully flighted, so they needed a lot more enrichment and training to keep them in shape and active which, looking back, is something I don’t think that they really got being education birds in the two AZA zoos that had lots of elderly docents (though, to be fair, like our volunteers, the birds were retired, having been given to us by hunters who weren’t flying them anymore, so maybe they were fine taking it easy in their golden years). Still, unlike red-tails or red-shoulders (and certainly unlike accipiters), it seemed like they wanted to interact.

At the raptor center, the director would take our male bird hunting once or twice a month, and he’d often let him loose while he did chores around the hawk barn. More than once, I’d swing by to pick a bird up for a program, or to check a sick animal, and I’d see him sitting out front on a stump, cutting leather for jesses or some other task, with the male hawk perched on the roof of the barn about thirty feet away, or looking down on him from a nearby tree – but always coming back to the glove when called. Seeing this, it’s no surprise that this species is so popular in free flight demos, which is probably the best way to present them (I wasn’t brave enough to try free flying the hawks, not sure they’d come back for me, so I’d put them on a very long creance and take them out for flights).

​

The day I graduated college, I took my visiting family for a quick tour of the hawk barn before going to the main event (why I thought going to a facility caked in blood and bird poop in my one suit immediately before graduating was a good idea, I'll never know). I posed for a quick photo with the bird I worked with the most at that facility, the female Harris's hawk, Morticia. When the director of the facility first assigned Morticia to me (to train each other), he told me she was something of a hag... then explained that the practice of calling a cranky old woman a "hag" was from falconry, it being the term for a hawk that was wild-caught as an adult, irascible, and hard to train. Morticia wasn't wild caught, but she sure was the crotchiest HAHA I'd ever met.

​

Looking back on the years working with Harris’s hawks, one thing surprises me. When doing our educational programming, we always highlighted their social nature – how they raise young together, hunt together, even how they’ll even perch on top of one another, forming a sort of totem pole. And yet… I don’t think I’ve ever seen two together. The two AZA facilities had one bird each. The raptor center had a male and female, but they were housed separately and didn’t interact. I just checked the North American holdings in ZIMS, and confirmed what I suspected – the vast majority of US holders of this species have a single bird, some have two (and a few facilities, which specialize in free-flight bird shows, have multiples).

This is a case of a species in which our management has been so largely informed by the historic use of the animal – in this case, as a falconry bird, where the bond is between person and bird, rather than bird and bird – that we overlook the actual nature of the species (much like how much of our traditional management of elephants in zoos is based on logging/mahout culture, or by circus culture). Perhaps once I’d like to see a family flock of Harris’s hawks maintained together, displaying natural social behaviors and flying together. Now that would be a sight.

 

[Aardwolf]

Following up with the Harris’s hawk, we’ll wind up the raptors. Ospreys traditionally fare pretty poorly under human care – it can be an extreme challenge getting a rescued bird to eat – and I’ve only worked briefly with one specimen. So today, we’ll talk about the turkey vulture (two AZA, one non-AZA) and the American black vulture (one AZA, one non-AZA).

​

Husbandry for these species is very similar and can largely be addressed together. Personality-wise I’ve found them to be a little different. Turkey vultures tend to be shy and fretful, and I’ve often witnessed (and sometimes caused) their famous regurgitation display. Black vultures, though smaller, tend to be much bolder, sometimes almost aggressively so. That said, I've worked with both as education animals before, and in my experience people who work with either of this species as program birds absolutely love them, considering the birds to have personalities that are almost puppy-like, perhaps made all the more jarring by their overall unsavory reputations.

When I was younger, black vultures were very much considered a bird of the American south (as well as the Neotropics); I remember a college girlfriend visiting me at home once and being delighted to see her very first black vulture. Now, their range continues to expand to the north. One would think that this would be indicative of turkey vultures being the more cold-tolerant of the two species, but I’ve not noticed black vultures proving to be that cold-intolerant. For both species, there is a benefit to providing a shelter, such as a dog house or igloo, well-bedded, and supplement heat, such as a heat lamp or pad, when the weather gets below freezing. Just because an animal can survive something doesn’t need they like it.

Feeding for vultures is, of course, the most natural thing – they eat dead things. Sure, commercial bird of prey diet is nutritionally complete, but carcasses have enrichment value as well, and it can be quite fun to watch a vulture turn a rat inside out like a glove until all that’s left is a discarded skin when it has finished. Puzzle feeders can help replicate the natural behaviors of reaching, picking, and pulling to extract meat from tight crevices. As with many meat-eating animals, vultures are inclined to glut themselves in captivity, so it’s ideal to watch their weight and body condition carefully to make sure you don’t overfeed.

Both of these species can be mixed with a variety of other birds, though I’m more inclined to trust turkey vultures than blacks, just based on personalities (and that fact that this species is more inclined to predation., although not to the extent that many farmers and ranchers believe) – I’ve kept turkey vultures with hawks, waterfowl, herons, and sandhill cranes, and I’ve seen them with prairie dogs and tortoises. If anything, I think some birds can find them annoying, as the vultures have big personalities and can get underfoot/in the way, especially of larger birds who don’t understand why the big doofus wants to be their friend. I’ve had a turkey vulture in a walk-through aviary, albeit with occasional worries of the bird being too approachable for its own good or the nerves of visitors.

​

Handling vultures in a zoo or rehab setting is very different from handling hawks, falcons, eagles, owls, etc. The other birds kill prey with their powerful, taloned feet, and it is the foot that you have to worry about when catching them up. Vultures, in contrast, don’t have powerful claws. What they do have is a beak that’s meant to tear through carcasses much larger than what a similar-sized hawk or owl would eat – and they can bite readily and with great strength. I’ve lost blood to four of the seven New World vulture species, though to be fair I’m willing to believe that the turkey vulture was an accident.

Like Harris’s hawks, vultures of both species are very social birds, and it surprises me that I’ve never seen a large group in a zoo (I mean, a large group that was an exhibit. I’m pretty sure I saw more black vultures in Elmwood Park Zoo in one day than all of the exhibit animals put together), nor have I ever taken care of more than one individual of each species at a time. This may be because they are most often kept as ambassador birds, but even as exhibit birds I’ve never seen a group. What I have seen is a captive turkey vulture or black vulture in an exhibit, with several of its wild comrades coming down to hang out and social through the fencing – which, of course, is exactly what your vet loves to see during times of heightened concern about HPAI. It seems like most zoos that want a native vulture species want a single specimen for education or as an example for exhibit, rather than a group. To be fair, they are pretty low maintenance animals.

The vast majority of turkey and black vultures in zoos are non-releasable birds, maybe injured in the wild, or taken illegally from the nest and raised as a pet. In the case of birds which are non-flighted, they are sometimes kept in open-topped yards (as a curious side note, I’ve often seen African vultures, feather clipped or pinioned, kept in hoofstock yards, and while I dislike the practice, it strikes me that I never saw a clipped king vulture or condor in a yard with tapir, guanaco, capybara, etc. I have seen flightless turkey vultures with deer).

 

[FBBird]

So far in this thread, we’ve talked about a variety of North American raptors – various owls, falcons, the accipiters – and I was going to write a post about the Buteo as well. I’ve worked with three species – the omnipresent red-tail, its woodland and marsh counterpart, the red-shoulder, and the diminutive broad-wing – but thought that to much of that post would just be cross-referencing the other raptors. Then, I remembered there was one other North American hawk that I worked with, one that is in many ways unique from the others. That is the Harris’s hawk, sometimes called the baywing.

(I was trying to figure out where to put my single northern harrier as well, before deciding that particular bird just didn't have any good stories or lessons attached to it...)

View attachment 803809​

Whereas the vast majority of the birds that I worked with were rehab, nonreleasable birds, none of the Harris’s hawks that I worked with at two AZA facilities, and one raptor rescue center, were not. Nor were they wild born… nor were they even native to the region which I was working out of. All were captive-bred birds, previously (or, in the case of the raptor center, still) used for falconry. Harris’s hawks are among the most popular of falconry birds – in fact, I’ve heard some falconers say that they are too easy, and discourage novices in the field from starting with the species, because they’re too forgiving of bad habits and bad training that need to be improved. The reason for this is largely due to the unique social life of Parabuteo – they are social, pack hunters, living in family groups, and when you’re used to hunting with several other birds, it doesn’t take an enormous stretch of imagination to hunt with a human and a pack of hounds.

Much of the care with the various Harris’s hawks was the same as the other hawks – diet, enclosures, basic husbandry parameters. They really differed the most in their training. Unlike the rehab birds, the HAHAs were all fully flighted, so they needed a lot more enrichment and training to keep them in shape and active which, looking back, is something I don’t think that they really got being education birds in the two AZA zoos that had lots of elderly docents (though, to be fair, like our volunteers, the birds were retired, having been given to us by hunters who weren’t flying them anymore, so maybe they were fine taking it easy in their golden years). Still, unlike red-tails or red-shoulders (and certainly unlike accipiters), it seemed like they wanted to interact.

At the raptor center, the director would take our male bird hunting once or twice a month, and he’d often let him loose while he did chores around the hawk barn. More than once, I’d swing by to pick a bird up for a program, or to check a sick animal, and I’d see him sitting out front on a stump, cutting leather for jesses or some other task, with the male hawk perched on the roof of the barn about thirty feet away, or looking down on him from a nearby tree – but always coming back to the glove when called. Seeing this, it’s no surprise that this species is so popular in free flight demos, which is probably the best way to present them (I wasn’t brave enough to try free flying the hawks, not sure they’d come back for me, so I’d put them on a very long creance and take them out for flights).

View attachment 803810​

The day I graduated college, I took my visiting family for a quick tour of the hawk barn before going to the main event (why I thought going to a facility caked in blood and bird poop in my one suit immediately before graduating was a good idea, I'll never know). I posed for a quick photo with the bird I worked with the most at that facility, the female Harris's hawk, Morticia. When the director of the facility first assigned Morticia to me (to train each other), he told me she was something of a hag... then explained that the practice of calling a cranky old woman a "hag" was from falconry, it being the term for a hawk that was wild-caught as an adult, irascible, and hard to train. Morticia wasn't wild caught, but she sure was the crotchiest HAHA I'd ever met.

​

Looking back on the years working with Harris’s hawks, one thing surprises me. When doing our educational programming, we always highlighted their social nature – how they raise young together, hunt together, even how they’ll even perch on top of one another, forming a sort of totem pole. And yet… I don’t think I’ve ever seen two together. The two AZA facilities had one bird each. The raptor center had a male and female, but they were housed separately and didn’t interact. I just checked the North American holdings in ZIMS, and confirmed what I suspected – the vast majority of US holders of this species have a single bird, some have two (and a few facilities, which specialize in free-flight bird shows, have multiples).

This is a case of a species in which our management has been so largely informed by the historic use of the animal – in this case, as a falconry bird, where the bond is between person and bird, rather than bird and bird – that we overlook the actual nature of the species (much like how much of our traditional management of elephants in zoos is based on logging/mahout culture, or by circus culture). Perhaps once I’d like to see a family flock of Harris’s hawks maintained together, displaying natural social behaviors and flying together. Now that would be a sight.

A (retired falconer) friend has a group of four Harris’s housed together, with multiple nest sites, swing perches, pond. They interact and function as a family group, although not allowed to breed

 

[Aardwolf]

A few notes today about some of the smaller boas and pythons. Most of this experience has been from AZA facilities, especially the two in which I worked more extensively with reptiles.

There are two many species in these groups to go into too much depth on husbandry and care. They run the gamut from terrestrial to highly arboreal, rainforest to desert (with the resultant different needs in temperature and humidity). All, of course, are carnivores, as all snakes are, and as such are mostly fed pre-killed rodents in a zoo setting, though in the wild diets may differ, with health consequences that we don’t yet understand (and something diets that we think we understand but don’t – a certain species which has long been assumed to be a bird specialist, or example, but which recent studies in the wild suggest is no such thing).

I’ll first start off with those two classic workhorses of zoo reptile collections, the emerald tree boa (or whatever the heck we’re calling them these days… splitters, man) and the green tree python. The two species are not, of course, that closely related, but the uncanny similarity in their appearances, usually both seen curled up on their branches in seemingly the exact same manner, that visitors and even some keepers can get them confused. They make for a compelling exhibit on convergent evolution, and as such are often exhibited together. At one zoo, the snakes were displayed next to each other in matching 4’ x 4’ x 4’ cubes, lushly planted and with perching positioned so as to encourage the snakes to stay draped in view. It worked very well, and the snakes were always in the public eye, though they did have options to retreat. Both exhibits were misted heavily to replicate rainforest conditions. The ETB shared space with dart frogs and lemur tree frogs, with GTP with carpet pythons. At a second AZA zoo I worked at, the exhibits were similar, though at that facility the ETB shared an exhibit with matamata.

Neither species is super active, nor is either one especially fond of handling. I have special recollections of a half-blind GTP I worked with at one non-AZA that I named “Longshot.” I gave him his name because, due to his visual impairment, he tended to wildly miss when I would offer him a rat on forceps, and more than once overshot and came far closer to my face than I appreciated.


Longshot, in a moment of repose

(I’d originally intended for this post to just be about those two species, and be in more depth – than I accidentally introduced a third species, and then a fourth, and then anarchy ensued)

In hindsight, it was a mistake, perhaps, housing the GTP with carpet pythons (at least in a mixed-sex group), because the two species presented us with eggs before I started, which keepers, thinking they would either be green tree python eggs OR carpet python eggs (we frequently bred both species) incubated and hatched out. The resultant snakes were the carpondros, hybrids, arboreal snakes with vivid blue and yellow patterning and some of the foulest tempers I have ever seen. Our curator was very embarrassed by the production of the hybrids – this was at the time zoo herp collections were trying to distance themselves a bit from the pet trade – and the snakes were kept off exhibit in a row of Neodeshas (newspaper substrate with water crocks, a hide house, and a few branches) in the back, and we were forbidden to speak of them to visitors or (this was pre-cellphone camera days) take pictures of them.

The only snakes in the collection with a temper that was arguably worse than the carpondros were the Puerto Rican boas. We kept a few on exhibit in the lobby, housed with Puerto Rican crested toads, but most were in the back, also in Neodeshas. What I really hated about serving the PRBs was that their cages were stacked on the top shelf, so to service them I had to get on a ladder, balanced precariously. More than once, one would bite me and I’d fall off the ladder with a snake latched to my arm, having overshot the feeding tongs (one day, I walked into the back of the reptile house and saw a keeper reading the newspaper – poop stained, from having recently been used as bedding for a snake, with their arm in a bucket of water next to them. Attached to their hand, and submerged in the bucket, was one of the Puerto Rican boas – the keeper was submerging their hand so that the snake would eventually let go of their hand so it could breathe).

Many of these smaller pythons and boas bred well under our care. In the back of the reptile house we had a nursery – a glorified term for a rack system of shoe-box sized enclosures – in which we brought up the young of several species. Looking back at one memory, for example, I had about two dozen Brazilian rainbow boas (easily one of the most beautiful of all snakes), a half dozen carpet pythons (real carpet pythons, not carpondros – we learned that lesson fast), and a pair of Madagascar tree boa babies. Their set ups were very simple, and looking back I’m not entirely comfortable with the size, lack of complexity, or seemingly mechanical care they received when I was in “production line” mode. One advantage, I feel, of the trend of zoos making more of their behind the scenes spaces visible to the public is that it forces us to think more carefully about how we’re doing all aspects of our jobs, not just the front-facing ones.



Among the other smaller species worked with were the Children’s python (maintained behind the scenes in a tub as an ambassador animal), the annulated boa (care very similar to the emerald tree boa), the rosy boa (one of the most delightfully tractable and low-maintenance species I’ve ever encountered, no idea why they aren’t more popular as pets), ringed pythons (kept off exhibit because they were suffering from crypto – they were the last snakes I serviced every day, and if after doing them I realized that I needed to take care of something in another snake’s enclosure, I would have to ask an uncontaminated keeper to do it for me), as well as two species that I’d like to end today’s post talking about. One is one of the world’s most commonly kept snakes, which I’ve worked with in half a dozen zoos, AZA and non, and see almost monthly in pet shops – the other is a rarity treasured by many curators that I worked with in only one AZA zoo.

The Angolan python, in appearance, at least, resembles nothing as much as a somewhat larger version of a ball python - I could easily imagine seeing a very large ball python or a small Angolan python labeled as each other in a zoo display, and me not noticing the difference if I didn't look too closely. The one is a species which has been very uncommon in the pet trade - and not extremely common in zoos - due to the difficulty in collected specimens from war-torn Angola. The other is one of the most common pet snakes in the world.

What makes the Angolan python so desirable to so many pet keepers, then? Why is an Angolan python highlighted in reptile houses, while the ball python is used for education programs?

The answer is the rarity. If the situations were reversed, I could imagine Angolans being "a trash snake" that zoo snobs barely glanced at, with facilities being flooded with requests to take in surrendered pets, while balls were treated as gems.

Quoting Gerald Durrell, back from he was a young zookeeper experiencing these thoughts himself:

“I think it was at this time that I suddenly realized the full meaning of the term 'rare.' Hitherto when people talked about a rare animal I had always been under the impression that this simply meant that it was rare in museum collections or in zoological gardens, but actual rarity in numbers had not really impinged on me. This, I think, was because people tended to say an animal was rather rare as though this were an accolade, as though it were something the animal should be proud of."

The Durrell quote has always spoken to me, because it seems that we value some animals solely because they're rare, and value them for that rarity alone. In some contexts, in could make sense - ideally zoos and aquariums would be devoting resources to conserving and breeding rare animals. In other cases, it can decidedly take a sinister turn. When a species of chelonian, or parrot, or frog, or what have you, is known to be rare, that has a tendency to immediately make it more desirable in the pet trade - legal or otherwise - than it would if it were common. That in turn has a tendency to drive demand and result in more collection (often illegal, usually unsustainable) from the wild to feed the demand, further endangering the species in the wild.

Even in zoos, where we are committed to conservation, we sometimes talk in such a manner where we seem to be bragging. It's like we're saying that if we have an animal that is this rare, you know it must mean we're a good zoo.

I sometimes also worry that it creates the impression that rarer animals have more value (in an inherent rather than financial sense) that common ones. That's simply not true. A giant panda does not *deserve* better care than an American black bear just because one is found in three US zoos and the other is in hundreds. Every animal deserves the best care that we can provide them, whether they are rare or common, exotic, native, or domestic - and whether we are zookeepers or private pet owners.

I wonder if maybe messaging would be different if we re-framed how we talked about rarity. Yes, some animals - apex predators, island species, extreme specialists - are naturally rare. But many others are only rare because of our activities. Perhaps we should view an animal's rarity not as something that the animal should be proud of - but rather as something that we should be ashamed of.

 

[Strathmorezoo]

A few notes today about some of the smaller boas and pythons. Most of this experience has been from AZA facilities, especially the two in which I worked more extensively with reptiles.

There are two many species in these groups to go into too much depth on husbandry and care. They run the gamut from terrestrial to highly arboreal, rainforest to desert (with the resultant different needs in temperature and humidity). All, of course, are carnivores, as all snakes are, and as such are mostly fed pre-killed rodents in a zoo setting, though in the wild diets may differ, with health consequences that we don’t yet understand (and something diets that we think we understand but don’t – a certain species which has long been assumed to be a bird specialist, or example, but which recent studies in the wild suggest is no such thing).

I’ll first start off with those two classic workhorses of zoo reptile collections, the emerald tree boa (or whatever the heck we’re calling them these days… splitters, man) and the green tree python. The two species are not, of course, that closely related, but the uncanny similarity in their appearances, usually both seen curled up on their branches in seemingly the exact same manner, that visitors and even some keepers can get them confused. They make for a compelling exhibit on convergent evolution, and as such are often exhibited together. At one zoo, the snakes were displayed next to each other in matching 4’ x 4’ x 4’ cubes, lushly planted and with perching positioned so as to encourage the snakes to stay draped in view. It worked very well, and the snakes were always in the public eye, though they did have options to retreat. Both exhibits were misted heavily to replicate rainforest conditions. The ETB shared space with dart frogs and lemur tree frogs, with GTP with carpet pythons. At a second AZA zoo I worked at, the exhibits were similar, though at that facility the ETB shared an exhibit with matamata.

Neither species is super active, nor is either one especially fond of handling. I have special recollections of a half-blind GTP I worked with at one non-AZA that I named “Longshot.” I gave him his name because, due to his visual impairment, he tended to wildly miss when I would offer him a rat on forceps, and more than once overshot and came far closer to my face than I appreciated.

View attachment 805002
Longshot, in a moment of repose

(I’d originally intended for this post to just be about those two species, and be in more depth – than I accidentally introduced a third species, and then a fourth, and then anarchy ensued)

In hindsight, it was a mistake, perhaps, housing the GTP with carpet pythons (at least in a mixed-sex group), because the two species presented us with eggs before I started, which keepers, thinking they would either be green tree python eggs OR carpet python eggs (we frequently bred both species) incubated and hatched out. The resultant snakes were the carpondros, hybrids, arboreal snakes with vivid blue and yellow patterning and some of the foulest tempers I have ever seen. Our curator was very embarrassed by the production of the hybrids – this was at the time zoo herp collections were trying to distance themselves a bit from the pet trade – and the snakes were kept off exhibit in a row of Neodeshas (newspaper substrate with water crocks, a hide house, and a few branches) in the back, and we were forbidden to speak of them to visitors or (this was pre-cellphone camera days) take pictures of them.

The only snakes in the collection with a temper that was arguably worse than the carpondros were the Puerto Rican boas. We kept a few on exhibit in the lobby, housed with Puerto Rican crested toads, but most were in the back, also in Neodeshas. What I really hated about serving the PRBs was that their cages were stacked on the top shelf, so to service them I had to get on a ladder, balanced precariously. More than once, one would bite me and I’d fall off the ladder with a snake latched to my arm, having overshot the feeding tongs (one day, I walked into the back of the reptile house and saw a keeper reading the newspaper – poop stained, from having recently been used as bedding for a snake, with their arm in a bucket of water next to them. Attached to their hand, and submerged in the bucket, was one of the Puerto Rican boas – the keeper was submerging their hand so that the snake would eventually let go of their hand so it could breathe).

Many of these smaller pythons and boas bred well under our care. In the back of the reptile house we had a nursery – a glorified term for a rack system of shoe-box sized enclosures – in which we brought up the young of several species. Looking back at one memory, for example, I had about two dozen Brazilian rainbow boas (easily one of the most beautiful of all snakes), a half dozen carpet pythons (real carpet pythons, not carpondros – we learned that lesson fast), and a pair of Madagascar tree boa babies. Their set ups were very simple, and looking back I’m not entirely comfortable with the size, lack of complexity, or seemingly mechanical care they received when I was in “production line” mode. One advantage, I feel, of the trend of zoos making more of their behind the scenes spaces visible to the public is that it forces us to think more carefully about how we’re doing all aspects of our jobs, not just the front-facing ones.

View attachment 805003

Among the other smaller species worked with were the Children’s python (maintained behind the scenes in a tub as an ambassador animal), the annulated boa (care very similar to the emerald tree boa), the rosy boa (one of the most delightfully tractable and low-maintenance species I’ve ever encountered, no idea why they aren’t more popular as pets), ringed pythons (kept off exhibit because they were suffering from crypto – they were the last snakes I serviced every day, and if after doing them I realized that I needed to take care of something in another snake’s enclosure, I would have to ask an uncontaminated keeper to do it for me), as well as two species that I’d like to end today’s post talking about. One is one of the world’s most commonly kept snakes, which I’ve worked with in half a dozen zoos, AZA and non, and see almost monthly in pet shops – the other is a rarity treasured by many curators that I worked with in only one AZA zoo.

The Angolan python, in appearance, at least, resembles nothing as much as a somewhat larger version of a ball python - I could easily imagine seeing a very large ball python or a small Angolan python labeled as each other in a zoo display, and me not noticing the difference if I didn't look too closely. The one is a species which has been very uncommon in the pet trade - and not extremely common in zoos - due to the difficulty in collected specimens from war-torn Angola. The other is one of the most common pet snakes in the world.

What makes the Angolan python so desirable to so many pet keepers, then? Why is an Angolan python highlighted in reptile houses, while the ball python is used for education programs?

The answer is the rarity. If the situations were reversed, I could imagine Angolans being "a trash snake" that zoo snobs barely glanced at, with facilities being flooded with requests to take in surrendered pets, while balls were treated as gems.

Quoting Gerald Durrell, back from he was a young zookeeper experiencing these thoughts himself:

“I think it was at this time that I suddenly realized the full meaning of the term 'rare.' Hitherto when people talked about a rare animal I had always been under the impression that this simply meant that it was rare in museum collections or in zoological gardens, but actual rarity in numbers had not really impinged on me. This, I think, was because people tended to say an animal was rather rare as though this were an accolade, as though it were something the animal should be proud of."

The Durrell quote has always spoken to me, because it seems that we value some animals solely because they're rare, and value them for that rarity alone. In some contexts, in could make sense - ideally zoos and aquariums would be devoting resources to conserving and breeding rare animals. In other cases, it can decidedly take a sinister turn. When a species of chelonian, or parrot, or frog, or what have you, is known to be rare, that has a tendency to immediately make it more desirable in the pet trade - legal or otherwise - than it would if it were common. That in turn has a tendency to drive demand and result in more collection (often illegal, usually unsustainable) from the wild to feed the demand, further endangering the species in the wild.

Even in zoos, where we are committed to conservation, we sometimes talk in such a manner where we seem to be bragging. It's like we're saying that if we have an animal that is this rare, you know it must mean we're a good zoo.

I sometimes also worry that it creates the impression that rarer animals have more value (in an inherent rather than financial sense) that common ones. That's simply not true. A giant panda does not *deserve* better care than an American black bear just because one is found in three US zoos and the other is in hundreds. Every animal deserves the best care that we can provide them, whether they are rare or common, exotic, native, or domestic - and whether we are zookeepers or private pet owners.

I wonder if maybe messaging would be different if we re-framed how we talked about rarity. Yes, some animals - apex predators, island species, extreme specialists - are naturally rare. But many others are only rare because of our activities. Perhaps we should view an animal's rarity not as something that the animal should be proud of - but rather as something that we should be ashamed of.

Hi Aardwolf I don't know if this is your last post on this thread (i hope that its not)but the last paragraph I found very profound. As humans, the way we have behaved and are still behaving created what is rare and we should absolutely be ashamed ! Also liked your comment on " splitters".

 

[Aardwolf]

@Strathmorezoo, I’ve got a few left in me, though we definitely are getting towards the end of the thread – some of the species I’ve worked with really just don’t lend themselves to good story-sharing posts (“I’ve taken care of barbary partridge at one non-AZA zoo. I kept them in a walk-through aviary and fed them grain. That’s it. That’s the post.”) Likewise, I’ve (for the most part) been skipping domestics, as well as some of the more common exotic pet species, such as chinchillas, bearded dragons, etc. It’s been fun doing this thread, but it’s also been a bit tiring, and I’m looking forward to finishing up soon – though I did save a few of my favorites as a finale, which will be making their appearances in the next few days.

Zookeepers, almost by their definition, love animals. But very few people love all animals, and even zookeepers aren’t immune from having animal phobias. So what is it like when you take care of animals that make your skin crawl?

For as long as I can remember, tarantulas have been the stuff of my nightmares. Like many zoo visitors, I was always drawn to the animals I feared when I visited a zoo, making myself go up to look at a goliath birdeater, even though I knew I loathed the animals. In my first zookeeping job ever, taking care of education animals as a teen keeper at my local zoo, I was dismayed to discover that my section included not only a variety of cool birds, mammals, and herps, but a Texas tan tarantula. Contemplating the spider in its plastic tote, I thought to myself, “Well, I’ll feed it. And I’ll water it. But if I catch it wandering about on the floor, I can’t promise I’ll show it any mercy.” I managed to care for that animal for months without touching it, and looking at it as little as possible.

I was able to get away with this, of course, because there were other members of the staff who were fond of spiders and would pick up the slack on this animal, so much so that I don’t think they noticed how arachnid-averse I was. I wasn’t to have that luck at my next spider-job, where I again had a mixed section that included a single Chilean rose-haired tarantula. Unlike at my previous job, everyone here was scared of spiders (so why did we even have her?). I quickly realized that at some point, I might have to make peace with this animal.


Holding the Chilean rose for the first time!

Which really wasn’t that hard to do. She was a very docile, relatively immobile animal. Her exhibit was a Plexiglas box, about 18” long, 18” wide, 6” tall, with mulch substrate, a water bowl, and a few small pieces of furniture. Caring for her involved always making sure she had a cricket in her cage and that the water was clean and full. Tarantulas are averse to air currents, so I soon discovered that a little blow of air could cause her to move to the opposite end of the enclosure, allowing me to clean. She never approached me or behaved aggressive at all. Which is what finally gave me the confidence one day to pat her on the back of the abdomen.

If I had been blindfolded at the time, I would have mistaken it for a mouse. Eventually, it got to the point where I bit the bullet and was able to pick her up, putting one hand flat in front of her, then scooting her onto it, where we would sit, gently. Soon, I was using her for education programs. I didn’t ever get to the point where I didn’t have the heebie-jeebies after holding her, though – it was like the symmetry and structure of her body was just wrong to me, the way she moved off-putting and weird. What’s funny is that the one thing that always calmed me down after handling the spider was handling a snake – they were so much smoother and more elegant in their movements that they were the anti-spider to me.

Our zoo decided to host a major Halloween event, and as such I was given a budget to get a few more invertebrates to round out our modest collection of hissing cockroaches and emperor scorpions (for some reason none of these species, not even the scorpions, made me uncomfortable like the tarantula did – I could handle them just fine), as well as our rose hair. I used it to buy some banana slugs, some giant millipedes (a species I’ve always adored), and a Vietnamese giant centipede I named Cthulhu, who quickly proved to be one of the scariest animals I ever worked with. I also got us another tarantula. This one was a Mexican fire-leg named Cinder… and if she was fiery in appearance and name, she was even more so in personality.



I’m so glad I’d made peace with the rose hair, because if my first hands-on spider experience had been with Cinder… well, Cinder wouldn’t have stuck around long enough to be named. She was an active, scurrying handful. One day, she ran up my arm, over my shoulder, and settled in the middle of my back. I couldn’t reach her, and I was afraid to try to scrape her off. Only one other member of the staff wasn’t afraid of spiders (despite my best efforts to train other keepers), so I tried calling her on the radio. She didn’t respond – she was giving pony rides at the time, I was told by another keeper. I asked someone to run over and relieve her so that she could report to the reptile house, but was told no one could do that, everyone was busy. I asked again. Finally, our director burst into the reptile house, wanting to know what the big issue was. I just turned my back to her, pointing out the large spider cleaning to the back of my shirt. When I turned back around, the director was as pale as a sheet, leaning against the door frame, looking like she was going to faint. She promptly went and relieved the keeper giving pony rides, who came to take the spider off my back.

Cinder was far more defensive than the rose, and had a tendency to kick her urticating hairs at the slightest provocation, though never on me. She did bite me once, however, though I don’t hold a grudge on that. I was taking her to a school, and was walking her in front of a class, holding her in my hand so everyone could see her up close. One kid (these were middle schoolers – old enough to know better, too young to care) suddenly took a swing at her, like he was going to squash her. I pulled her back to keep her safe, and the sudden movement startled her, so she bit my hand. It felt like a bee-sting, not too bad, and I was able to finish the presentation… but on the drive back to the zoo afterwards, I noticed my hand itching like crazy, and it would itch whenever I would touch a tarantula – either of them – for the next month. It was customary back then that after visiting a school, the kids would all write me letters – fan mail, if you will. Every single one of the letters from the assembly said their favorite part was watching me get bitten. I like to think that at the very least, I showed them that tarantulas aren’t that dangerous.

Even after several more years – and more tarantulas, both in zoos and in the wild – I still consider myself somewhat afraid of them. I try to appreciate them, and to help visitors appreciate them. What I strongly dislike is when animal folks use their relationship with “scary” animals to shock visitors for amusement – I would never do it with snakes, and I hate it when people do it with spiders. It not only is mean to visitors and reinforces the idea that the animals are bad or dangerous, it also has the potential to put the animals in harm’s way. I had a co-worker who was dark skinned and had a dark, patchy beard – he liked to play a prank in which he would put a tarantula on the side of his face, where it blended in fairly well, and then walk up to folks, starting a conversation, getting closer to closer until suddenly they would notice his beard was moving slightly. The first time he did that to me, I was so startled that I almost walloped him across the face with a rake I had in my hand at the time, which would have done a number on the spider (which I would have regretted) and his face (which I wouldn’t have regretted).

After my practical-jokester colleague shaved, the spider prank didn't work as well as it used to​

That being said, I did once take a perfectly formed molt from one of our tarantulas to take a very annoying new keeper down a peg in a prank. I’m not entirely proud of it… but I’m a little proud.

 

[Strathmorezoo]

@Strathmorezoo, I’ve got a few left in me, though we definitely are getting towards the end of the thread – some of the species I’ve worked with really just don’t lend themselves to good story-sharing posts (“I’ve taken care of barbary partridge at one non-AZA zoo. I kept them in a walk-through aviary and fed them grain. That’s it. That’s the post.”) Likewise, I’ve (for the most part) been skipping domestics, as well as some of the more common exotic pet species, such as chinchillas, bearded dragons, etc. It’s been fun doing this thread, but it’s also been a bit tiring, and I’m looking forward to finishing up soon – though I did save a few of my favorites as a finale, which will be making their appearances in the next few days.

Zookeepers, almost by their definition, love animals. But very few people love all animals, and even zookeepers aren’t immune from having animal phobias. So what is it like when you take care of animals that make your skin crawl?

For as long as I can remember, tarantulas have been the stuff of my nightmares. Like many zoo visitors, I was always drawn to the animals I feared when I visited a zoo, making myself go up to look at a goliath birdeater, even though I knew I loathed the animals. In my first zookeeping job ever, taking care of education animals as a teen keeper at my local zoo, I was dismayed to discover that my section included not only a variety of cool birds, mammals, and herps, but a Texas tan tarantula. Contemplating the spider in its plastic tote, I thought to myself, “Well, I’ll feed it. And I’ll water it. But if I catch it wandering about on the floor, I can’t promise I’ll show it any mercy.” I managed to care for that animal for months without touching it, and looking at it as little as possible.

I was able to get away with this, of course, because there were other members of the staff who were fond of spiders and would pick up the slack on this animal, so much so that I don’t think they noticed how arachnid-averse I was. I wasn’t to have that luck at my next spider-job, where I again had a mixed section that included a single Chilean rose-haired tarantula. Unlike at my previous job, everyone here was scared of spiders (so why did we even have her?). I quickly realized that at some point, I might have to make peace with this animal.

View attachment 805144
Holding the Chilean rose for the first time!

Which really wasn’t that hard to do. She was a very docile, relatively immobile animal. Her exhibit was a Plexiglas box, about 18” long, 18” wide, 6” tall, with mulch substrate, a water bowl, and a few small pieces of furniture. Caring for her involved always making sure she had a cricket in her cage and that the water was clean and full. Tarantulas are averse to air currents, so I soon discovered that a little blow of air could cause her to move to the opposite end of the enclosure, allowing me to clean. She never approached me or behaved aggressive at all. Which is what finally gave me the confidence one day to pat her on the back of the abdomen.

If I had been blindfolded at the time, I would have mistaken it for a mouse. Eventually, it got to the point where I bit the bullet and was able to pick her up, putting one hand flat in front of her, then scooting her onto it, where we would sit, gently. Soon, I was using her for education programs. I didn’t ever get to the point where I didn’t have the heebie-jeebies after holding her, though – it was like the symmetry and structure of her body was just wrong to me, the way she moved off-putting and weird. What’s funny is that the one thing that always calmed me down after handling the spider was handling a snake – they were so much smoother and more elegant in their movements that they were the anti-spider to me.

Our zoo decided to host a major Halloween event, and as such I was given a budget to get a few more invertebrates to round out our modest collection of hissing cockroaches and emperor scorpions (for some reason none of these species, not even the scorpions, made me uncomfortable like the tarantula did – I could handle them just fine), as well as our rose hair. I used it to buy some banana slugs, some giant millipedes (a species I’ve always adored), and a Vietnamese giant centipede I named Cthulhu, who quickly proved to be one of the scariest animals I ever worked with. I also got us another tarantula. This one was a Mexican fire-leg named Cinder… and if she was fiery in appearance and name, she was even more so in personality.

View attachment 805153

I’m so glad I’d made peace with the rose hair, because if my first hands-on spider experience had been with Cinder… well, Cinder wouldn’t have stuck around long enough to be named. She was an active, scurrying handful. One day, she ran up my arm, over my shoulder, and settled in the middle of my back. I couldn’t reach her, and I was afraid to try to scrape her off. Only one other member of the staff wasn’t afraid of spiders (despite my best efforts to train other keepers), so I tried calling her on the radio. She didn’t respond – she was giving pony rides at the time, I was told by another keeper. I asked someone to run over and relieve her so that she could report to the reptile house, but was told no one could do that, everyone was busy. I asked again. Finally, our director burst into the reptile house, wanting to know what the big issue was. I just turned my back to her, pointing out the large spider cleaning to the back of my shirt. When I turned back around, the director was as pale as a sheet, leaning against the door frame, looking like she was going to faint. She promptly went and relieved the keeper giving pony rides, who came to take the spider off my back.

Cinder was far more defensive than the rose, and had a tendency to kick her urticating hairs at the slightest provocation, though never on me. She did bite me once, however, though I don’t hold a grudge on that. I was taking her to a school, and was walking her in front of a class, holding her in my hand so everyone could see her up close. One kid (these were middle schoolers – old enough to know better, too young to care) suddenly took a swing at her, like he was going to squash her. I pulled her back to keep her safe, and the sudden movement startled her, so she bit my hand. It felt like a bee-sting, not too bad, and I was able to finish the presentation… but on the drive back to the zoo afterwards, I noticed my hand itching like crazy, and it would itch whenever I would touch a tarantula – either of them – for the next month. It was customary back then that after visiting a school, the kids would all write me letters – fan mail, if you will. Every single one of the letters from the assembly said their favorite part was watching me get bitten. I like to think that at the very least, I showed them that tarantulas aren’t that dangerous.

Even after several more years – and more tarantulas, both in zoos and in the wild – I still consider myself somewhat afraid of them. I try to appreciate them, and to help visitors appreciate them. What I strongly dislike is when animal folks use their relationship with “scary” animals to shock visitors for amusement – I would never do it with snakes, and I hate it when people do it with spiders. It not only is mean to visitors and reinforces the idea that the animals are bad or dangerous, it also has the potential to put the animals in harm’s way. I had a co-worker who was dark skinned and had a dark, patchy beard – he liked to play a prank in which he would put a tarantula on the side of his face, where it blended in fairly well, and then walk up to folks, starting a conversation, getting closer to closer until suddenly they would notice his beard was moving slightly. The first time he did that to me, I was so startled that I almost walloped him across the face with a rake I had in my hand at the time, which would have done a number on the spider (which I would have regretted) and his face (which I wouldn’t have regretted).

View attachment 805150
After my practical-jokester colleague shaved, the spider prank didn't work as well as it used to​

That being said, I did once take a perfectly formed molt from one of our tarantulas to take a very annoying new keeper down a peg in a prank. I’m not entirely proud of it… but I’m a little proud.

Hi Aardwolf, although I have never worked with spiders within zoos, I did work with various spiders during my time as cheif technician ,zoology department, university of Birmingham. I was responsible for setting up "phobia courses so we not only had various species of spiders,(we accepted over 50 black widows, which had been confiscated by customs,no one else wanted them)we also had various species of snake. I wasn't particularly frightened of spiders, especially as I was the one trying to help the poor people with their spider phobia. However, I did prefer handling other species. The species that I preferred for the courses were ,Chilean rose and red knee . I also have a story regarding a spider molt. There was work being carried out by electrical contractors within one of our animal units. One electrician, was a particularly mouthy individual, so we thought that we would play a prank on him . According to him he wasn't frightened of any animal, so during his lunch break we put a recent molt by his work bag and waited. He came back, took one look at the molt and stamped on it. He actually kept spiders as pets. He thought it was hilarious, you will have to try harder than that, he said, laughing with his mate. Oh well, you can't win them all !

 

[Aardwolf]

Sometimes you see an animal for the first time and, for no particular reason, the species just makes an impression on you. That was my experience over a decade ago, when I was visiting one southern zoo, passing through their walk-through aviary, and saw my first straw-necked ibis. It was splayed out in a bush, perhaps on a nest, the sunlight was making its seeming-black back shimmer with alternating shades of copper, purple, and green. The straw-like feathers on the neck gave it a wild appearance. I didn’t know much about ibises at the time and would have been hard-pressed to name a single species other than the ubiquitous scarlet back then, but I was entranced. I decided that someday I wanted to work with some.

That chance came just a few years later when I was designing an Australian aviary for my zoo. Straw-necked ibises where never common in zoos, (maybe more-so at that moment than they were a decade earlier), but the birds were now managed as an SSP. I saw my chance to get some and jumped on it. We obtained one bird from one zoo, a second from another (along with a pair of masked lapwings – that zoo was proving to be difficult to book a shipment with, and honestly I just wanted to get the hell out of town, as crazy as everyone was driving us). The two ibises were introduced to each other in the winter holding building of the alligator exhibit (this being summer, and the gators were outside, of course) and, after a little chasing and fighting, settled in nicely.

It was a treat to release them into the Aviary that my colleagues and I built ourselves, where the ibises lived alongside spotted whistling ducks, the masked lapwings, eastern rosella, and later tawny frogmouth. The exhibit was about 30 feet long by 20 feet wide, maybe 12 feet tall, with a small pool; attached to it was a small wooden building with heaters, which served as winter holding (they were fairly cold tolerant, and we didn't lock them in until it go to the 20's, but they always had access to their indoor space. In summer and, especially, on rainy days, I liked to leave their food inside to keep it fresher and cooler, and to prevent it from becoming a soggy, smelly mess). The ibises were fed a diet similar to our herons and egrets, Nebraska bird of prey diet with chopped capelin or smelt. They'd often pick up pieces of fish, drop them into the pool, and then fish them out and eat them (regrettably, they'd also sometimes do this with the bird of prey diet, which would dissolve in the water). They were shy, awkward birds, always eager to keep their distance from us, but were favorites of the public with their striking appearance.

If there’s one thing that’s always made me nervous about ibises, it’s the beak. It’s so long, thin, and fragile, and can break very easily. On the eight-hour drive back to our zoo with the ibis, I was constantly checking on the bird, afraid that it was going to poke the beak through a gap in the crate and have it snap off. Ibises can be easily panicked in walk-through aviaries, and you always have to worry about the possibility of them crashing into the mesh and damaging their beaks. I was most concerned about this because, while the roof of the aviary was made of looser mesh (the better to handle snowfall), the sides were nearly-invisible Zoo Mesh, which I could easily imagine a bird crashing into if it couldn't see it.



Ibises as a group are very sociable birds, and if we’d had space (we were limited by the footprint of the space where we were building the exhibit), I’d have loved to have had a larger flock, maybe a half dozen birds so that we could breed. They also mix very well with a variety of other birds, including other ibises, and I’ve never had any issues with negative interactions with other species.

Over the years I’ve since seen straw-necks at a few other facilities, but I’ll always remember that first delight of seeing them at Audubon. One of my favorite zoo experiences is that I can continue to come across exciting new species that I’d never heard of before, even after so many years.

 

[Strathmorezoo]

Sometimes you see an animal for the first time and, for no particular reason, the species just makes an impression on you. That was my experience over a decade ago, when I was visiting one southern zoo, passing through their walk-through aviary, and saw my first straw-necked ibis. It was splayed out in a bush, perhaps on a nest, the sunlight was making its seeming-black back shimmer with alternating shades of copper, purple, and green. The straw-like feathers on the neck gave it a wild appearance. I didn’t know much about ibises at the time and would have been hard-pressed to name a single species other than the ubiquitous scarlet back then, but I was entranced. I decided that someday I wanted to work with some.

That chance came just a few years later when I was designing an Australian aviary for my zoo. Straw-necked ibises where never common in zoos, (maybe more-so at that moment than they were a decade earlier), but the birds were now managed as an SSP. I saw my chance to get some and jumped on it. We obtained one bird from one zoo, a second from another (along with a pair of masked lapwings – that zoo was proving to be difficult to book a shipment with, and honestly I just wanted to get the hell out of town, as crazy as everyone was driving us). The two ibises were introduced to each other in the winter holding building of the alligator exhibit (this being summer, and the gators were outside, of course) and, after a little chasing and fighting, settled in nicely.

It was a treat to release them into the Aviary that my colleagues and I built ourselves, where the ibises lived alongside spotted whistling ducks, the masked lapwings, eastern rosella, and later tawny frogmouth. The exhibit was about 30 feet long by 20 feet wide, maybe 12 feet tall, with a small pool; attached to it was a small wooden building with heaters, which served as winter holding (they were fairly cold tolerant, and we didn't lock them in until it go to the 20's, but they always had access to their indoor space. In summer and, especially, on rainy days, I liked to leave their food inside to keep it fresher and cooler, and to prevent it from becoming a soggy, smelly mess). The ibises were fed a diet similar to our herons and egrets, Nebraska bird of prey diet with chopped capelin or smelt. They'd often pick up pieces of fish, drop them into the pool, and then fish them out and eat them (regrettably, they'd also sometimes do this with the bird of prey diet, which would dissolve in the water). They were shy, awkward birds, always eager to keep their distance from us, but were favorites of the public with their striking appearance.

If there’s one thing that’s always made me nervous about ibises, it’s the beak. It’s so long, thin, and fragile, and can break very easily. On the eight-hour drive back to our zoo with the ibis, I was constantly checking on the bird, afraid that it was going to poke the beak through a gap in the crate and have it snap off. Ibises can be easily panicked in walk-through aviaries, and you always have to worry about the possibility of them crashing into the mesh and damaging their beaks. I was most concerned about this because, while the roof of the aviary was made of looser mesh (the better to handle snowfall), the sides were nearly-invisible Zoo Mesh, which I could easily imagine a bird crashing into if it couldn't see it.

View attachment 806771

Ibises as a group are very sociable birds, and if we’d had space (we were limited by the footprint of the space where we were building the exhibit), I’d have loved to have had a larger flock, maybe a half dozen birds so that we could breed. They also mix very well with a variety of other birds, including other ibises, and I’ve never had any issues with negative interactions with other species.

Over the years I’ve since seen straw-necks at a few other facilities, but I’ll always remember that first delight of seeing them at Audubon. One of my favorite zoo experiences is that I can continue to come across exciting new species that I’d never heard of before, even after so many years.

Hi Aardwolf, I was offered a pair of Straw-necked ibis (and a pair of Little Egrets) earlier this year, I was very tempted. Unfortunately, they were quite expensive and I didn't really have a suitable aviary for them . Realistically, sometimes, you just have to say no as difficult as it is.

 

[Aardwolf]

Among the species that I’ve worked with, there are few that I’ve had a longer or more satisfying career with than the Andean bear (I grew up calling them spectacled bears, but the common name was starting to switch over at about the time I worked with this species). My experience is largely limited to one AZA zoo (with some brief encounters and work experience at other facilities), where I worked with several individuals of the species over the course of several years.

Our facilities were a two-part exhibit; one, an old concrete grotto fronted with a pool, the other a keeper-built (before my time) annex of natural substrate, rocks, and live trees, supplemented with other climbing structures. Neither was really big enough – and the old concrete side was fairly inadequate – but they worked well enough at times when we had either one bear or the bears were being managed together (which we tended to do more than most zoos did, acknowledging the limitations of our space). It got to be problematic when bears had be separated, as one would always get the short end of the stick and be stuck in the crummy concrete side. The exhibit had a holding building consisting of two dens, as well as a separate holding building (built as a maternity den) which also included a (very small) off-exhibit yard. Towards the end of my time at this zoo, we built a chute system that connected allowed us to more easily move the bears from one to the other in a circuit, while also providing slightly more space for the animals.

The individuals that I worked with ran the gamut from an old, blind, geriatric male to rambunctious cubs. Personality-wise, Andean bears seem to divide according to sex. The males tend to be big, dumb, and lovable, very good natured and sweet. The much smaller females tend to be sassier and smarter, perhaps to help them hold their own, and one I worked with had a mischievousness that sometimes seemed to border a bit on a mean streak. The differences in the sexes could best be described by recounting my experiences introducing a newly acquired female to a male at the zoo.

The female was in the larger, more natural yard first when we introduced the male (having previously had some visual and olfactory introductions through barriers). She took one look at him, noped, and nipped up to the top of a tree. He plopped down at the base of it and sang to her (the trill of an Andean bear is a lovely sound, one of my favorite animal calls). Overcoming her own doubts, she slowly began to descend. Closer and closer she came, edging towards the waiting male. Closer. Then closer still. Soon, their noses were almost touching… which was when she swiped out with a paw, walloping him upside the head. Before the much bigger bear had even finished staggering backwards, Chaska was back up in her perch at the top of the tree. Undaunted, he shook himself off and resumed his position. He continued to sing. Sure enough, she began to cautiously approach him once again. And, sure enough, as soon as she was close enough, she smacked him upside the head again. The process continued throughout the day. Her movements became less fearful, more mischievous. The continued to call her – and accept his smacks – with weary resignation. By the time the Zoo closed that evening, he had won her over. She was using him as a doormat.



She continued to prank him over the years. One October I presented the bears with some Halloween-themed enrichment – a big metal trough of water, in which I floated a few whole apples for the bears to bob out. The male immediately got into the holiday spirit, dunking his snout in and out of the water and trying to grab the crisp red apples. The female took up a position on the exact opposite side of the tub and, eyeing it contemplatively, hatched a plan. With careful timing, she shoved the trough with both of her front paws as hard as she could, creating a cascading tidal wave that drenched the hapless male. Before the thoroughly soaked male could even shake himself off, the female was peering out from behind a tree at the other end of the exhibit. The look on her face could only be described as remarkably smug.

That dominance shifted suddenly when the breeding season began, when the male would walk around the exhibit, yowling (the sort of sound you’d expect to hear the devil making while gargling his throat), grabbing her around the waist, pulling her out from a tree, and mounting her. The resultant cub was one of the most delightful animals I’ve ever worked with, and it was an absolute treat watching her grow up – she was so smart, so sweet, and so playful – if I had a magic wand that would have let me freeze her at the size she was at four or five months old, I’d have done it and kept her with me always. We kept her until she was about a year and a half old, which is about as long as females will usually tolerate their cubs before driving them off, and we followed mom’s cue as to when it was time to separate. If we’d had a larger exhibit complex we might have kept her for longer, but juggling the bears in the limited space we had wasn’t optimal welfare. I was one of the staff who escorted her to her new home at another zoo. I was accompanied by another of her keepers, who did his best not to let me know that he was crying on several occasions of the trip, like a parent sending a child off to college.

​

Andean bears are the most herbivorous of the bears, giant pandas excluded, and their diet at the zoo reflected that. We used alternating Mazuri Omnivore or Bear as a base, supplemented with lots of fruits and vegetables, as well as a wide variety of enrichment foods, such as honey, nuts, pumpkins, fish, meat, eggs – really, I don’t think there was anything in our commissary that I didn’t give to the bears at one point or another, and I sometimes went to the store specifically to look for novel items for them. Interestingly, one food item that none of them ever seemed excited about was pineapple, despite that being a food that wild Andean bears are supposed to go crazy over (in parts of their range, they’re sometimes called the pineapple bear, and one of their main natural food sources is the pineapple’s wild cousin, the bromeliad). Peanut butter was a special favorite – the first male that I worked with was a fairly old individual and required a lot of pills, which we would give him in peanut butter sandwiches daily. The bears also had a major sweet tooth – when I needed to injection train that older male, I discovered that he would tolerate any amount of poking and prodding in exchange for a steady stream of maraschino cherry juice, squirted into his mouth through a syringe.

For special events at the zoo, I would make "bear cakes" - mashed chow as the dough, sweetened with honey and dyed with food color, frosted with peanut butter, and decorated with fruits and nuts.


A birthday cake for a cub's first birthday (to be shared with mom)

Like other bears, their intelligence and dexterity make them both a challenge and a reward to train and to enrich. They can learn a variety of behaviors, such as presenting paws for blood draws, opening their mouths for dental inspections, and even standing on stools to allow themselves to get an ultrasound (joke was on us – we did an ultrasound on the female bear on year, saw nothing. Then, she gave birth to twins). The bears play hard, so are limited as to what toys they can receive – one female picked up and through a bowling ball with such force that a big chunk of it flew off – I was glad she didn’t think to throw it at the exhibit window. They also figure out puzzle feeders very quickly, so you constantly have to work to come up with new challenges for them. Females generally are more interested in enrichment. Young and old, our males seemed most interested in reclining in a firehose hammock. Like I did with the coatis at our zoo, I sometimes would take camp groups into the exhibit for what I called "super enrichment" - where we'd do all the enrichments at once - scents, hidden food, puzzle feeders, boxes, etc - and then turn the bears loose to see what they would do first.
The bears were tolerant of any climatic conditions, though they seemed more tolerant of winter cold than summer heat (especially the males, which are bigger). In the summer, our adult males both liked to get in the pool and splash, or sometimes even swim, doing the doggie paddle, which I never saw the females do. In the winter, they would roll around in the snow; one of the keepers told me that one winter day the staff came in after a heavy snowfall and thought that a male bear had escaped… until they noticed a large pile of snow in the corner was shifting slightly. The male had eschewed his holding building and fallen asleep outside, becoming completely covered with several inches of snow. Likewise, I remember watching our little cub on her first snowfall (well, the first snowfall she was out of the den for – like most US zoo Andean bears, she was born in winter, but didn’t emerge until the spring). She at first stood tentatively in the doorway, looking at the snow, not trusting it – but soon was throwing herself into it, which was deeper than she was tall in some places.

My humble, unbiased opinion – the Andean bear is the best zoo bear. Unlike brown bears and black bears, they are active year round. Unlike sloth bears and sun bears, they look like “real bears.” Unlike polar bears, they don’t require insanely expensive accommodations. They are one of the smaller bears, and their highly arboreal nature means that zoos can utilize vertical space much more effectively than they can with some other bear species. They breed easily. Though we tend not to do it in the US these days, many European zoos put them in mixed species exhibits (a zoo text book I read years ago used Andean bear and coati as an example of mixing a smaller, more assertive species with a large, more tranquil one). They are active, attractive, engaging, tolerant of a wide variety of climatic conditions, representatives of one of the most threatened ecosystems on earth, and all around wonderful animals. Whenever I would visit National or San Diego, I’d be amazed at the crazy crowds at the pandas, which sit there eating bamboo all day, while the much better show is going on at the Andean bear exhibits.

 

[Aardwolf]

When I was a young reptile keeper right out of college, there were many species that I was very excited to work with – as well as many that I was, as of that moment, unaware of the existence of, but would later grow to be fascinated by. But there was one species that I was more thrilled to work with than any other, an animal that was almost legendary to me, and one that I couldn’t believe that they were going to let me - a newbie keeper – stand in the same room with, let alone care for.

Our group of tuatara were the pride of the collection. They were housed in a large walk-in exhibit, about the size of a small bedroom, with a rocky backdrop, lots of plantings, and substrate for burrowing. I sometimes wonder what visitors thought of that exhibit – one of the largest in our building, with enormous graphic panels which no one ever read, all dedicated to an animal that, if they actually saw it, more closely resembled a drab brown iguana. When I’d bustle through the lobby on errands, I’d always slow down in front of the exhibit to see if they were out and if people could see them – and at least once a week, I’d hear some visitor mention, bored, “Oh, I had one of those as a kid,” or “They’re all over the place in grandma’s yard in Florida.” That your grandma should be so lucky, I would think.

The tuatara were fed a diet that was a mixture of insects (mostly crickets) and rodents (probably more rodents than we should have – that’s a frequent trend I see in zoo reptile diets). I remember one of our keepers was obsessed with the idea of obtaining wetas from New Zealand and forming a breeding colony of them so that we could feed them to the tuataras; the zoo’s two designated invertebrate keepers, who were part of our department, would always inform him of the impracticality of that suggestion, a conversation that played out about once a week. Water was provided in a shallow pool.

What I mostly remember about working with the tuataras was being cold. Like most reptile houses, our building – and especially the backup areas, from which we accessed the exhibits – was extremely hot. Even in winter, I usually wore shorts to work every day, just making that brief dash to the building, and then basking under the omnipresent heat lamps all day. The tuatara exhibit, however, was often fairly cold, especially if you were just coming in from the tropical rest of the building. It was often in the 50s Fahrenheit in there, and I remember being baffled and amazed that these reptiles liked to be kept so cold. Temperatures and lighting (full spectrum) were changed seasonally to mimic conditions in New Zealand. Like other ectotherms, their temperature was linked to that of their environment. When I would pick up a tuatara for weighing and measuring, it felt like I was holding a Beanie Baby which someone had, for some reason, left in the refrigerator overnight.

(One note about handling – I’d never encountered the slightest hostility or resistance from them when picking them up, but was still very cautious about doing so – not so much for fear of harming the animal, but for fear of being bitten. One of the keepers – the one with the weta fixation (also the guy who did a tug of war with a monitor for a dead rat, a story I told many posts ago) went on and on about the power of their bite – “Let them get their jaws on you, and you’ll understand the genus name “Wedge Tooth” he would say. Not sure if this was based on firsthand experience).

My time with the tuataras was years before Chester Zoo secured the honor of being the first zoo to breed tuataras outside of New Zealand, and our team wanted to secure that title for ourselves. One day, the keeper and I were checking the burrows in hopes of finding eggs, when we found the exact opposite thing that you want to find in such a situation – a moribund, nonresponsive tuatara. My colleague, panicking, grabbed the animal in one hand and immediately fled the exhibit, jumped in his car, and sped to the zoo hospital. Unfortunately, his zookeeper instinct was too strong in one regard – even in his panic, he made sure to lock the exhibit door on the way out. Unfortunately, I was still inside.

​

To help maintain the cool temperatures of the habitat, the tuatara exhibit was built like a concrete bunker, and I soon found out that I got no radio reception inside it, as I tried to call for another keeper to let me out. And so, being stuck, I did the only thing I could think of in the situation. I sat down on a rock, pulled a tuatara out of a burrow, and plopped it in my lap. If you’d walked by in the next twenty or thirty minutes, you would have seen a scrawny young zookeeper sitting meditatively in the middle of the exhibit, waving at you while one of the world’s most unique vertebrates perched on his thigh. Eventually, another keeper passed by (most had followed my colleague to the zoo hospital once they’d heard what was going on), saw me, and ran to the back to let me out.

 

[Aardwolf]

It’s hard to believe, but we’ve come to the 125th – and final – species profile for the Zoo Man’s Notebook, 2025. Thank you to everyone who contributed with comments and questions and helped make it engaging. And what better species to end on than one that was there at the beginning of my career?

I’ve worked with a single aardwolf over the course of my career, very early on. The species wasn’t the rarity that it is now – ZAA (American, not Australian) just announced they’re starting an Aardwolf Animal Management Program, their version of the SSP, building on the recent breeding success of ZooWorld – and I’m embarrassed to say I took it for granted that the species would always be around. As it was, I was actually a little disappointed. Hyenas were my favorite animals, and I considered an aardwolf to be a poor substitute – tiny, shy, secretive, not a bone-crushing predator that could hold its own against lions. Still, all of that youthful jaded cynicism flew out the window when I met Acacia.

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She was the last aardwolf at our facility, which had historically housed and bred many, and she was in her golden years. Before I worked with her she’d lived in few exhibits around the zoo, from a bedroom-sized habitat in the small mammal house to an outdoor cage originally built for leopards and bears. When I worked with her, she had just moved in to what would be her final home – a brand new exhibit, a grassy yard, slightly sunken off the main path, with tall grasses framing the back and a large artificial termite mound in the center. She shared the habitat with a flock of guineafowl; aardwolf can be mixed with a variety of species, and before moving into this habitat, Acacia had lived with rock hyrax, squirrels, monkeys, and other species over the years. Despite their insectivorous diet, aardwolves will eat meat if you make it very easy from them, such as if a bird were to fly into an exhibit window and land at their feet.

This was probably at least partially due to her age, but Acacia spent much of the day sleeping. Aardwolves are nocturnal by nature, so this was no big surprise. If a hollow log were positioned in an appropriate space, she’d often sleep in that, fully on few of visitors but seemingly unconcerned. Sometimes, especially on cooler days, she’d sleep on top of a pile of hay out in the open, soaking up the sun.

Aardwolves historically posed a challenge to keep in zoos because of their diet, a problem which historically plagued many insect-eating animals (I had a wildlife biologist from Ecuador come to an American zoo with me once, and he was floored to see that giant anteaters were not only commonly kept but commonly bred here). The same has been true of aardwolves – perhaps complicated further by the fact that historically so many zoos insisted on treating them like “proper” hyenas and giving them a meat-heavy diet. We did give Acacia some meat, to be sure, but she also ate chow, insects, and a sort of gruel. With advances made in zoo nutrition since then, I’m sure a superior diet has since been developed, but it worked well enough for her.

Acacia’s habitat was attached by a runway to a nearby hoofstock barn, in which she had a small stall for the cooler weather. Inside or outside, we were able to go in with her no problem, and she always politely kept her distance, but would approach, warily, for a treat if one was offered. I was always cautious about this part – the canine teeth of an aardwolf are surprisingly large, though meant for defense, not predation, and you’d seldom guess it looking at their sweet little faces.

Visitors seldom gave the aardwolf a second glance, which was a pity, because the more I got to know her and study her species, the more fascinating I found them. The species is attractive, evolutionarily unique, plays well with others, and makes a decent exhibit if you give them the chance. I’m happy to see that there’s at least a tentative resurgence of interest in the species. They are not endangered and, if sufficient interest were shown, imports could reestablish a North American zoo population (in my non-AZA days, I’d occasionally see them listed for sale in catalogs and websites, presumably wild-caught). If zoos were able to reliably breed them in the 1980s and 1990s, they could do it again, if there was enough interest.

But whether or not aardwolves make a real comeback (I’ve only seen the species once since Acacia’s passing), I’ll have memories of Acacia. I consider myself lucky to have lots of memories, actually, and the best part of writing this thread has been dredging my memory to relive some of them. I’m no longer at a stage in my career where I have daily animal interaction, which I often miss greatly, though I still occasionally manage to have some adventures with the critters, when I can convince the rest of the staff that I haven’t been behind a desk for so long that I don’t remember which end of a snapping turtle is the bitey one. So once again, thanks for your participation, and I hope that this has been fun and/or informative for you all. I’ll be happy to take any questions that arise, either here or in PM. I’ll leave you with a quote from Dana Payne, a late curator of the Woodland Park Zoo:

“Those of us who have chosen a life with animals know we have chosen well. Having a conversation with a lion is a fine way to start one’s day. For that matter, so is tossing tidbits to a toucan, or medicating a cobra. There’s something there, in the lion’s luminous eyes, in the gaudy splendor of the toucan, in the cobra’s sibilant protests: it’s magic. It’s the stuff of fairy tales to interact with animals like these, even in a scientific setting, and in spite of repetitious, routine chores. You should envy us, for we are the most fortunate of humans—we take care of the animals at the zoo.”​

Epilogue: A Note About the Notebook

Some of you may wonder how so many stories were able to pulled up and shared so quickly over such a short period of time. The answer is, many of them were already written. About 7 years ago, as I transitioned away from direct daily animal care, I began a project that I called the Managed Species Fact Profile. The goal was to research and write a detailed fact sheet on each of the AZA managed species (at the time numbering in the several hundreds – I’ve been working on it steadily since, and expect to finish it later this year). Each species had a 2-3-page fact sheet detailing the natural and captive history, followed by a journal entry in which I recorded personal memories of that species, either as a keeper, a visitor, or in the wild. Many of those stories formed the basis of this notebook.