Monday 24th October 2011
Who's who in our latest arrival the wallabies
Since the wallabies arrived at the zoo a couple of months back, they have become increasingly friendly and understanding of who is giving them their food as well as where they need to go at the end of the day when it comes to putting them away for the night. The public feeding sessions are going very well also.
Of the 6 wallabies we have, 4 of them readily come bouncing over upon the first indication of food, whilst we are still waiting for 2 of them to loss their inhibitions and becoming more trusting.
In the meantime the challenge is to try and find features to try and tell them apart. The wallabies are affectionately named after Seseame Street characters and the two that we are less keen to come over are 'The Count' and 'Mr. Snuffleufagus' as they are known. These two are quite distiguishable from the others as 'The Count' is the only albino white wallaby we have and 'Mr Snuffleufagus' is the largest brown wallaby. The problem lies in identifying the remaining 4 brown wallabies, especially essentially they all have very similar personalities. So the only logical solution is to bring to the blog a new feature that will run of the next few days to help with this process of telling the wallabies apart: a new 'Wallaby of the Day' feature! Over the next 6 blog posts we will try and feature a different Wallaby for each day.
Here is an almost complete group shot before one decided to hope off. The way the wallabies are positioned, this photo wouldnt look too far out of place on the front of a album cover, maybe they should form their own band!
Halloween starts to appear at the Zoo
With Halloween at the end of the month, our education officer Tracey has created a stark reminder to the scary situation in the real world of conservation by creating a conservation graveyard. This highlights a range of species that have gone extinct at the hands of man, destroying their habitat or actively hunting them to extinction in some cases. Hopefully we can keep it that we dont have to add too many additional species to future displays like this, but unfortunately that is not very likely.
Modification to Casper's Enclosure
Our male White Lion, Casper has a bedroom attached to his enclosure like all the other cats at the zoo do, but for him, the way it is designed, he has to down a tunnel past Diamond and Ayshas enclosure to reach it. This is fine as long as Diamond and Aysha arnt already in their enclosure as with the cats being close to each other it would cause a bit of a stand off through the bars. So our Paul from the maintenance team was putting up a curtain of sorts today to prevent this from happeneing and with any luck will allow Casper to have access to his bedroom permanently whilst he is in his enclosure without having a growling exchange with Diamond and Aysha. Here Paul is installing the barrier whilst Aysha checks his work for any errors!:
Capser shows his strength again - Another pole broken!
One of the cats favourite things is to hunt. It is illegal to put live prey enclosures so to best thing we can do is simulate a hunt by moving food around on a feeding pole. This really exercises the cats muscles and is very beneficial for their health as well as being very fun for them (Casper ususally get fed three seperate pieces using this method and he usually stops eating the first piece as he would rather chase the second piece once it starts to be dangled down).
Well, Casper being the burly young alpha male of a lion he is, has broken quite a few of the devices we have used to feed him in the past with his sheer strength and today indeed he managed to completely bend a steel scaffolding rod we have been using to feed him.
In the shot below this was the act that bent the rod finally and when he pulled down on this, the rod bent. The aftermath can be seen in the bottom photo!
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