Welcome to the Zoo!

Wow, what an incredible whirlwind of a week it has been for my first week as an intern in the Education Department at the Lehigh Valley Zoo. I apologize in advance for how long and detailed this post will be but there is just so much to tell! 

To try and make this a bit more organized, I’m going to start by giving you a run down of our daily routine at the zoo!

7 am-10 am: Cleaning, Feeding, Preparing

As soon as I arrive at 7 am, we get started with cleaning the animal enclosures, feeding and watering the animals, doing additional maintenance, and preparing for that day's programs. The Education Department is only responsible for caring for the animals that we use for education which includes about a dozen birds of prey, lots of reptiles and amphibians, a skunk, groundhog, fennec fox, and a few others! As I quickly learned, running a zoo is far from a simple task. Each animal has very different requirements that we must be aware of as we clean, handle, and care for them. There are also a lot of tasks that you wouldn’t think of like weighing the animals to track their health and weighing the food they don’t eat each day! While some people definitely wouldn't enjoy the cleaning aspect of the day, I do enjoy it because it allows me to get more face time with the animals and learn more about them. There are a few different locations where the education animals are kept so the staff members switch off who cleans what animals each day, which again allows me to get to meet a lot of cool critters. Prehensile- tailed porcupines are definitely one of my favorites to clean and hang out with. Q, Jasmine, and Baby may smell awful but they’re total sweethearts and the coolest looking animals ever.

Source: https://www.lvzoo.org/animals/prehensile-tailed-porcupine-brazilian-porcupine/

10 am- 2 pm: Programming

There are so many different educational programs run by the department but I’ll just go over the ones I’ve experienced!

Animal Kingdom

Any group can book an Animal Kingdom program, usually schools do to allow their students to see the animals up close and personal. We bring out a few different animals and take about ten minutes to talk about each one and sometimes allow the students to touch them. The animals we use depend on what the group requests as well as who is facilitating the program. Before a staff member can work with and present an animal, they must go through an introduction process to ensure that they know how to safely handle the animal. There is also certain levels of animals based on how difficult they are to handle. So far, I have mostly worked with the smaller reptiles and the ferrets, oh and the Madagascar Hissing Cockroaches (they’re a lot cooler and less nasty than you think)!

Hannah and Steph (two staff members) doing an Animal Kingdom program with Doug, our African grey parrot

Nature Hikes and Creek Studies

The Lehigh Valley Zoo sits in the middle of the 1,100 acre Trexler Nature Preserve which we absolutely take advantage of! Nature Hikes are exactly what they sound like, one hour hikes through the preserve. Creek Studies also take place on the preserve, in the Jordan Creek, where we help students to find small invertebrates in the water. Both Nature Hikes and Creek Studies aren’t very scripted because we take advantage of whatever plants and animals we see on that particular day!

Zoo Tours

Zoo tours are an hour long and although we don’t speak about every exhibit in the zoo, we do cover a good number as we make the loop around the zoo. While I do find the zoo tours slightly intimidating (that’s a lot of information to remember!), I do really enjoy them because we get to cover so much information with the guests. 

Source: https://www.lvzoo.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/LVZooMap2016.pdf

ZooReach

ZooReach programs allow us to bring the zoo to you! We do presentations like the Animal Kingdom program, depending on what the clients request. On my very first day at the zoo, I traveled with my boss to a local Catholic school and did a presentation for their kindergarteners!

Afternoon: Cleanup

Most of the programming ends by 2 or 3 which gives me some time before I leave to clean up from the day and complete any tasks that the staff needs. This is also the time we use to clean the penguins which many of the staff members don't like because it's a little nasty but I kind of enjoy. They also feed the penguins in the afternoon which requires one person to feed them, one to record which penguin eats what, and one to give a presentation to the guests. This week I got the chance to record their diets and got to hang out with them in their enclosure for awhile, so cool!

Source: http://www.mcall.com/news/breaking/mc-pictures-african-penguins-at-the-lehigh-valley-zoo-20160407-photogallery.html

That basically covers everything I have done so far but I could honestly write a hundred pages about my week! It has been an absolutely incredible week filled with so much information, excitement, and fun and I cannot wait to become more independent and get the chance to do even more. I’m super proud of how well this week has gone and I look forward to really being an asset to the zoo and the department.

I have this weekend and Monday “off” (I’ll be selling Mother’s Day flowers for our family), but I can’t wait to get back to the zoo on Tuesday! I can tell already that this will be THE best summer of my life and I am so thankful that God has taken me down this path. 

Happy Mother's Day, thanks for reading!