Hand-rearing and Hand-restraint

Name: Lauren Silla
Class Year: 2017
Hometown: Cleveland, Ohio
Internship:Wildlife Conservation Intern
Location: White Oak in Yulee, Florida

            Throughout my internship at White Oak I have had the opportunity to be very involved in everything the keepers do everyday, including two very important tasks: hand rearing neonates and hand restraining hoofstock for routine procedures. The decision to hand rear an animal is never made lightly and is often the last resort in order to save an individual’s life. Hand rearing becomes necessary if there are health issues for the mother or calf, or maternal neglect (poor parental care sometimes due to a dam being a first time mother). During my internship there were a couple calves being hand reared. My role in this process has been to prepare bottles, feed the animals, and document notes on the progress of the animal including the amount of formula eaten and general behavior. Although this has certainly been an extremely adorable part of my job, it also comes with great responsibility. Interns are entrusted to care for these calves, most of which are threatened species, especially for the late night feeds, and because we want these animals to grow up with the appropriate behaviors we limit our interactions with them so they do not become overly friendly with people.

            Another really unique aspect of my White Oak internship is my involvement with medical procedures, particularly when hand restraining is necessary. Since all the hoofstock are housed in large pastures, the keepers are mostly hands off in the daily routine. However, when animals require medical care it is necessary to get hands on them. Deworming, vaccinating, or receiving annual check-ups all require getting the animals in hand. There are several options for getting animals in hand, but often the safest and least stressful option for smaller hoofstock is hand restraint. The process is fairly simple once one gets the hang of it. We herd the animal into a smaller space, one keeper gets ahold of the animals head and neck then lowers the animal into a laying position, and a second person holds onto the animal’s shoulder and back. The veterinarians are then able to examine the animal and administer any medication needed. The keepers and the vets work together quickly and efficiently to get this process done.

             Before my internship at White Oak, I had practically no experience hand-rearing or hand-restraining hoofstock. I was able to learn the skills and methods necessary for these procedures quickly because of the valuable instruction from the keepers and vet staff.  

One of the gerenuk males I assisted in hand-rearing

Restraining a critically endangered dama gazelle calf for vaccinations

Manually restraining a bongo antelope calf for a routine blood draw 

Week 10 in the Desert

Name: Mara Eisenbarth

Class Year: 2017

Hometown: Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

Internship: Elephant Intern

Location: Reid Park Zoo, Tucson, Arizona

Over the 10 weeks I spent in Tucson I have learned so much.  Not only have I learned a lot about elephant management, but I've learned how a successful team of keepers works together.  It has been really interesting seeing how differently keepers work together in small zoos compared to larger ones.  Here at Reid Park, all of the keepers have a morning meeting run by the zoo curator, whereas in Columbus, the morning meetings were split up by section to make them more efficient.  

So along with cleaning with the elephant team in the morning and observing or helping the team in the afternoon, I've been working on a project.  Before I came down to Tucson for the summer, my supervisor proposed that I make a compilation of videos that can be used to help incoming or new keepers learn how to train the elephants.  Over the course of the past ten weeks, I have been opportunistically filming the keepers while they train the elephants.  Ultimately I ended up with a slide or two dedicated to each behavior, and around 37 slides total.  After showing it to the keepers for feedback, I submitted it to my supervisor who also approved.  This project was beneficial to both myself and Reid Park zoo in that it taught me the basics and complexities of elephant training, while providing a resource with which to train the new keepers.   I was able to observe many many hours of training and go out to other parts of the zoo to observe other animals as well.

After three years in the Zoo and Conservation Science major, this opportunity was an incredible way to back up my knowledge of training, animal behavior, and zookeeping.  The elephant team was one of the most wonderful groups of people I've had the honor of working with.  Everyone was constantly looking to improve their already progressive management style.  No idea is too big if it means improving husbandry or welfare.  As a whole, the team taught me that you can never be overly qualified in the zoo field, as there is constant new research to be explored.  We are entering into a field that is changing by the day, and requires teamwork across the country and throughout the world.  It was very hard to leave this group of people after everything they taught me inside and outside of the zoo, but I am definitely more ready now than ever to jump into the mounds of work yet to be done to make a difference.

Thanks Reid Park!!!

                                                           

Enriching My Afternoons

Name: Nathan Tarr

Class Year: 2018, Junior

Hometown: Milton, West Virginia

Internship: Behavior and Large Mammal Intern

Location: Toledo, Ohio

Hello, again.  In my first blog, I gave a rundown of my normal morning as an intern for a Large Mammal keeper.  In this blog, I’ll be telling about the second half of my day working in the Animal Behavior department here at the Toledo Zoo. 

The Animal Behavior department does many things to help increase the welfare of animals here at the zoo.  We interns get to assist this work by supplementing keepers with enrichment, designing and creating new enrichment, and helping design and carry out welfare assessments. 

The majority of our work is done in the Museum of Science, one of the Works Progress Administration era buildings at the zoo.  It used to be a functioning museum with items in their collection such as suits of armor, old weaponry, and much more.  Now it contains the amphibian (one of my favorite areas) and insect collections at the zoo.  We have a kitchen and office in the museum where we make enrichment, design welfare studies, hold discussions about the zoo and animal world in order to better our understanding of the field we are currently working in. 

My job as the Large Mammal intern is to provide enrichment for the rhino, hippos, meerkats, brown bears, snow leopards, tigers, and sloth bear.  It makes for a good variety of enrichment that I get to construct and give to the keepers for the animals. 

We make enrichment for animals in order to stimulate behaviors that that animals’ wild conspecifics would demonstrate.  Encouraging these behaviors assists in keeping the animal healthy, both mentally and physically.  It also creates great opportunities for educating the public.  Watching a meerkats forage for insects coming from a PVC feeder allows guests to see behaviors that wild meerkats would be performing while foraging for insects coming from a rotting log.  This in turn provides opportunities to teach guests about the conservation of a species.  It all ties together to create a positive impact on the animal, the guest, and the species as a whole when animals are provided enrichment. 

It also falls on the Behavior department to assess the welfare of an animal through research and observation.  We design many studies aimed to achieve this goal by researching what behaviors an animal should exhibit and how often, and by observing and recording behaviors that our animals here at the zoo demonstrate.  Depending on what the study’s goal is, the results can tell us what the animal is doing, when it’s doing it throughout the day, where it’s doing it in the enclosure, and how often.  This makes for a great resource to track changes in the animal’s behavioral repertoire and figure out if there is anything we need to change to increase the animal’s welfare. 

All of these things are what my afternoon consists of; making and delivering enrichment, and studying animal behavior through data and observation.  It makes for a great experience educationally.  I particularly enjoy the research aspect and there are few things more rewarding when working here at the zoo than seeing a piece of enrichment you made successfully used by animal to stimulate a species-specific behavior. 

 

 An enrichment item I made called a brush box.  It contains brushes with insects scattered in them for the meerkats to forage for.

Mornings in Africa... In Ohio

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.