Name: Nathan Tarr
Class Year: 2018, Junior
Hometown: Milton, West Virginia
Internship: Behavior and Large Mammal Intern
Location: Toledo, Ohio
Hi, all! My name is
Nathan and I’m a junior in the Zoo and Conservation Science program at
Otterbein University. This summer, I am
interning at the Toledo Zoo in the Behavior and Large Mammal departments.
I’m here in Toledo along with two other Otterbein students
in the same program and we get to have a unique internship experience in that
our days are split between working with two different departments in the
zoo. This was one aspect of the
internship that really drew me to the Toledo Zoo because of the opportunity to
experience and learn more through different areas. I’ll be covering the work I do with each
department in their own separate blogs.
So first is Large Mammals!
I start every morning working with the area keeper for the
Rhino-Hippo-Meerkat section of the Large Mammal department. The meerkats may not be large but there are
certainly enough of them to make up a large mammal. First thing I help out with is cleaning Sam,
the rhino’s, enclosure, preparing and putting out his diet, and making or
constructing any enrichment he gets that morning. A few days a week we give him a shower and
put him in the chute along with some of his favorite food pellets so that we
can work with him more closely while still keeping both Sam and ourselves in a comfortable
and safe position. Rhino skin sheds
almost constantly, especially when it’s wet.
So when we have him in the chute, we exfoliate him and help get some of
it off, check his horns and feet, and give him some fly repellent. By 9:30, we’ve already had a busy and eventful
morning working with Sam!
Sam the rhino, 42 years young
After we’re done with Sam the rhino, we have a short hike
over to the hippos! There are two of
them at the Toledo Zoo in their enclosure which was the first “Hippoquarium” in
the world! Emma and Herby are mother and
son and are high profile animals at the zoo.
They are frequently visitors’ favorite animals at the zoo and draw quite
the crowd when they’re active. I help
clean the exhibit, and put out enrichment for the hippos and right before they
go out in the morning, I will help the area keeper with a training
session. I assist with target training
the hippos and keeping them motivated to participate by giving them fruits and
veggies as rewards for holding their mouths open while Robin (the area keeper)
inspects their mouths and brushes their teeth.
Once they go on exhibit, we will drain their holding pools and hose
scrub down every inch of their stalls and pools. Every now and then we get to toss food to
them when they’re in their pool which is one of my favorite things to do
because of how active it gets them.
Emma the hippo smiling for the camera
Our last stop in the morning in our loop of African mammals
is the meerkats. The Toledo Zoo
currently has 17 of these little mammals belonging to the mongoose family and
they’re a blast to watch. The amount of
different behaviors, vocalizations, and the intricacies of their social groups
can have me watching these guys for hours.
They require little hands-on work compared to the rhino and hippos but
their diets and enrichment gets a bit more complex. Their enclosure is great for encouraging
natural behaviors and that really helps to keep them healthy and maintain a
strong group bond, which is vitally important to these animals. In the morning, my main job with the meerkats
is to make their diets for the next day (which consists of some great looking
food, if I do say so myself) and make enrichment for them for the day. I get to be pretty creative with enrichment
for them because they are naturally curious about most things and require
enrichment that prolongs their time spent foraging. This means enrichment can be anything from
scattering king worms around the enclosure to freezing mealworms into ice cubes
with flavored water and putting that in a large bowl with water for them to
fish out. This area requires a decent
amount of cleaning too because they dig constantly so there is always sand and
dirt to be tamped back down or swept up.
They’re a ton of fun to watch though, especially when they have enrichment
or they’re feeling especially playful.
One of my favorite behaviors to see is their alarm call. Meerkats almost always have one individual in
their group acting as a sentry whose duty is to scan the horizon and sky for
predators. Every now and then they’ll
start their alarm call and everyone will scatter and when I look up, to my
surprise, they’re putting out the alarm call for an airplane, 30,000 feet in
the air that I could never find if I wasn’t looking for it. They’re quite impressive little creatures.
The meerkats at attention on their lookout
That concludes my mornings!
Next comes lunch (one of my favorite parts of the day) and my daily walk
around the zoo to see some other fun animals at Toledo like Baru, the saltwater
crocodile that is the largest reptile in captivity in North America, or
Emerson the Galapagos tortoise.
There are countless others that I
wish I could work with, and thanks to the second part of my day when I work
with the Behavior department, I get to work with many more animals! I’ll be covering that in my next post.
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