Lola's 14th Birthday; Halloween and Georgie's run for tigers

As always, there a lot to update about in the few weeks since the last update.

Lola's 14th

It was tigress Lola's 14th Birthday on the 27th of October this year. She was given a few extra treats, including a few presents as seen in the photo, such as some Rainbow Trout. Though expensive, Lola gave a reponse of 'if it aint broke dont fix it' and hesitantly tucked into this unusual food item, though looking like she would have prefered a big slab of her favourite meat. She enjoyed the attention she got from the zoo visitors that day as they were all there to admire her.
Still looking very youthful, firey and athletic, 14 is a relatively old age for a tiger, a wild one at least. In captivity, we would like to see Lola live a very healthy life with us and possibly reach 20 or so.
We did also take a moment to remember her sibling, of whom it would have also been a birthday for, Sultan who we lost earlier in the year, as he too was a fine cat and won't be forgotten.

Halloween



Of course it was Halloween at the end of the month and I'm glad to say the staff at the Isle of Wight Zoo were very forthcoming in setting up all sorts of halloween treats and activities for the animals and around the zoo, really getting into the spirit of it. Most of the animals had at least to step up to the challenge to get their food out of a pumpkin and other had a few other ideas thrown their way.

Here's Chiquita looking especially scary whilst defending her treat filled pumpkin:

This pumpkin has to be commended for having survived in such good shape, unlike the rest of it's companions who entered the cat enclosures, and is seen her posed with twins Diamond and Aysha.

Of course it was not just the cats who recieved halloween goodies, the primates did as well as the small mammals such as our colony of Degus, who enjoy nibbling on a pumpkin for a short time before must be removed to prevent them from over indulging too much! It was quite comical to watch how many degus could actually squeeze themselves into this pumpkin...

All members of the zoo staff dressed up and were happy to pose with their halloween craftmanship:

It wasn't just pumpkins that were used. Zia was visited by a flying bat which in good will, decided to fill it's insides with meat! This was lowered over the top of her enclosure via the feeding pole and Zia managed to jump up and swat the bat out of the sky for her reward!

Of course the primates wern't scared of anything as long as they knew that food was eventually coming their way!

Diamond tries to use his nose to try and work out if this dyed porridge mix is actually real blood...

Diamond still being fooled by the fake blood, but it does look real!

Georgie's Great South Run



 Tour Guide Georige, successfully ran the 10 mile Great South Run recently in support for the tiger conservation charity we support Global Tiger Patrol! She raised a significant amount of money that can now be put towards our substantial pledge to the charity for this year. Well done Georgie, the wild tigers of India thank you!!

A who's who of wallabies and another broken feeding pole!

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!

'Here's Bonnie....!!'

23th October 2011

Today we managed to get a few shots of Bonnie our new Red Ruffed Lemur that arrived on the 11th October from a collection in Bath called Endangered Madagascar. She is a 7 year old female and new girlfriend to our previously single red ruffed bachalor Andro.

Lemurs are social animals and so it is important for them to have company. Andro did previously live with his twin sister but they both have a genetic condition that causes them epilpsy and unfortunately despite daily medical treatment she succumbed to this condition earlier in the year leaving Andro by himself. The new pair of Andro and Bonnie are getting on fine and enjoying each others company. Because of Andro's condition he will not be a breeding animal because it would not be beneficial to the breeding program to pass on his genes.

These shots from today are from feeding time at the 12.30 talk which is the best time to see the two in action,

Red Ruffed Lemur 'Bonnie':



Hanging out foraging for fruit:

Bonnie is on the right hand side on this photo. The two lemurs are distinguishable by their eye colour, as you can notice Bonnie's eye are yellow and in the next photo, Andro's eye can be seen to be more orange.

Andro's firey ear tuffs blowing galantly in the wind:

The first frosty morning and a delivery of beer (kegs)!

20th October 2011

This morning was the first frosty morning we had down here on the Isle of Wight and the first need for the ice scrapers to come out for the frosty car windows in the morning. With the dynamic environment of the zoo, I took the camera around on the cat opening procedures in hopes of capturing this first frost in some way. I didnt really have an idea about how this might happen but I did notice that the woolen sheep's fleece's that we put in the cat enclosures for enrichment had managed to aquire a very frosted look overnight. Nothing too interesting however, but when we let Raijiv our for the morning, he came straight over to the fleece and started to roll around in it, treating the camera to a great photo! We had sprayed the fleece with a perfume fragrance (we give the cats different smells every morning) and this particular one sent him into rolling around mode!

Visitor treats cats to beer delivery!

We discovered a few months back a new enrichment toy for the cats that came about by accident really. Through trying to float some tiger food in the pond for Diamond and Aysha, we had tied two metal beer kegs (empty) together to act as buoyancy for the food. It was successful and made the cats swim out to get their meal. What we found however is the cats were more interested than the beer kegs than the food! This was because when they pulled them along the countoured ground it made all sorts of rattling and clanging noises that very much interested the cats! Especially Aysha, she was found playing with this toy for hours, and continues to enjoy recieving this toy to this day!

We had a visitor watching in the public audience one day by the name of Kieran and when one of the keepers mentioned about hoping to aquire some more beer kegs so that more cats could enjoy the idea (if we gave the beers kegs to one set of cats, you could visably see the jealousy in the rest of the cats as they watched them being pulled around). So Kieran decided he would take the challenge upon himself, along with the help of his dad, to source the zoo some more kegs for us; And indeed he did! We aquired enough kegs to make the zoo sounds like a catherdral if we gave a pair to all the cats and they decided to pull them around at the same time!

We are very grateful to Kieran and his Dad for helping the zoo out and the cats are of course very appreciative. Kieran came down to see the kegs being used with the cats and we gave a pair to Zena and Zia as well as Diamond and Aysha. The real show was watching Dimoand and Aysha trying to work out how they would approach the kegs that we had placed floating in the water. Kieran and the rest of the audience watched as the two cats contemplated swimming all the way in to get them. As the cats got nearer and nearer, tensions raised and there were a few growls along the way, but it was Aysha that finally got them in the end. She hadnt stopped playing with kegs by the time I left!

Hoping to catch a glimpse of Mr. Fox...

19th October 2011

Mr. Fox

For the past few months, the animal team have been getting to know a red fox that came to us from the British Wildlife Centre that had arrived there after being found orphaned. We have been encouraging him to get used to us, and our resident interns have spent hours upon end sitting with him in his offshow enclosure. On Sunday, we moved Mr. Fox, as he is currently known, into a on-show large ex-cat enclosure that he will now have the run off. Knowing he would be quite elusive whilst he is getting used to his new enclosure, I was hoping to grab a photo for the famous blog of him being released into the enclosure, but sure enough it all happened too quickly! The challenge now is to try and grab a shot of Mr. Fox investigating his new enclosure, as we will be keeping an eye on his behaviour to see how he adjusts to the new environment. So fingers crossed for some positive fox updates soon!

Cat Photo of the Day:



Here is Zena's having a quick drink from her stream today. Hopefully she will be admiring her reflecting more vividly with the planned cataract removal scheduled to take place within the next few weeks.

Another day of sun-bathing here in.. the middle of October!!

15th October 2011

Again we had fantasic weather here at the zoo today and walking around the zoo doing my keeper chores, I personally felt I would be quite happy joining the cats for a bit of sun-bathing!

Our Bengal Tigress Zia, can often be found on top of her rock soaking up some rays, but it is less familiar to see her sister the white tigress Zena doing the same. That's why it was great to be able to snap this photo of the two sisters both in the same frame of mind, chilling out together in the Sun, with Zena rolling around on her back in contentment in the cave below.

This is especially good to see, as Zena has been on a course of medication for a loss of appetite for the past couple of months and she is back to 100% now. This of course has come to the detriment of the zoo's bank account as she has been treated like a royal princess and is eating 5kg of minced chicken breast a day to satisfy her picky appetite! She absolutely loves in though and it's good to see her back in good health, ready for her eye operation in the coming weeks to attempt to remove her cataract.

A few more shots of Zena enjoying the Sun:

Primate Photo of the Day:

One of the most unique characters on the primate section is certainly the previously very overweight Mongoose Lemur, 'McLovin'. He lived most of his life as a sailor's pet, overindulging in the finer things in life such as grapes and bananas until he came to the Isle of Wight Zoo. He still carries a large amount of excess skin on his belly as a permanent reminder to his previous eating habits!

With the development of one of the lemur enclosures that has meant 'McLovin' and his lady friend 'Soa' have permant access to a very large enclosure, the keepers have been helping the lemurs aleviate their fears of this new wide open space and try and coax the lemurs out into the sunshine with some of their favourite fruits. Today we managed to get McLovin out to enjoy the sunshine on this lovely day, and as he doesnt normally venture this far, usually remaining in the shade, today's photo of the day is McLovin out in the sunlight heading towards a pile of some of his favourite things.

As an interesting note, some of our pairs lemurs that have never seen each other before, are meeting each other for the first time through the mesh thanks to the development of the lemur enclosure and this has resulted in all sorts of amusing interactions. Lemurs are generally harmless, but poor old McLovin here had his tailed yanked on by Mork, one of the lemurs living next to him now, which certainly made him speed up his usual waddle!

The fragile nature of plants (especially in tiger enclosures)

15th October 2011

We were planting some new vegetation in Chandru's enclosure today and as animals tend to thoroughly investigate something new in their enclosure, I always wonder whether the plants will survive their first meeting with the cats. To be fair the cats have quite a good track record at the moment, as when Chiquita the jaguar was moved into her new enclosure, she had quite a collection of pretty looking but very fragile plants that I was wagering might not see the next day. However all those plants are still standing and her enclosure still looks very attractive.

With the handful of new plants going into Chadru's today, I wondered if he would be any more destructive. Todays photos show the precarious situation these plants find themselves in as the same plant that is seen being planted here, is also seen in the background of the set of photos from today of Chandru's feeding session and you can imagine that once these cats get focused on food, all regard for the gardening goes out the window! Luckily for this helpless bamboo, Chandru was far enough away to spare it from his onslaught of tackling his food down from the rope and it lives to survive another day!