The Zoo had a trading card giveaway yesterday (3/20) so we went. We got an extra Red Panda card for showing up in the snow lol, I love how they've embraced their giveaway system.
We got to see one of the Mexican Wolves in the surgery center having a checkup! One of the volunteers agreed about the secrecy of the schedule. One of the wolves has been limping so they were performing a checkup, but the wolf was immediately taken back to the wilderness trek. The elephants were also getting baths so it was kind of a busy, albeit cold day.
We also learned that the CMZ adopted a female tree Kangaroo in January, but she hasn't made an appearance yet in the exhibit. The volunteer wasn't sure if they were looking to breed.
For something entirely different... my partner and I took a walk through Australia and while the area is beautiful and peaceful, it just feels forgotten. I suspect that major changes will come in my lifetime, whether that be the area completely renovated or turned into something else. Calling back to an earlier thread, it really is a product of a time and place where zoos focused more on education and hands-on experiences. There's the theater and the house, which call for a very unique type of labor.
I just don't know what the zoo can realistically do about an interactive experience in the era of record profits yet shrinking labor. Personally, I'd love to see the area staffed from March until July (the Asian Lantern Festival-ish?) specifically for the purpose of school field trips and day trips with children. You'd need to spin up an entire department though, from costuming to script-writing to rehearsal, and there's just no way to do that with the cutthroat budgets of 2024 stockholder etiquette.
