Taking Care of Hooves and Lemurs

It was nice to be back at the zoo after being gone for three weekends. The back area is familiar to me, it was a sunny day, and I knew where Denise would be - the giraffe barn.

We raked, swept, and shoveled the scattered poop and alfalfa, then let Asha back in the barn. Loren was helping Denise today, so there were three of us back there. Asha came in and I saw the bucket of Hoof Conditioner sitting on the floor by the door to the giraffe area. So, Asha was in the barn and Denise was trying to lure her close to the human-sized door so Loren could use a broomstick with a tiny, stiff brush on the end to get the mud off Asha's hooves. I hadn't really looked at hooves before. They're more like toes than I thought they'd be. Kind of a toe and hoof combination. Giraffes have one split in each hoof, so it's like they have 8 toes. Lots of mud gets stuck between there and it looks like it makes it harder to walk and the other parts of their hooves look dried out. If anyone knows anything about hooves, please comment.

So anyways, Denise was waving lettuce around, Loren was trying to be sneaky with the brush, and Asha was trying to eat the lettuce without moving her feet close to Loren. I was just watching and replenishing the torn lettuce supply. Asha was winning. Then Loren went for the hose and started spraying the mud off. That worked. So then Loren switched to the long stick with the hoof-polish-brush on the end. Asha had already gone through one head of lettuce. Denise was talking to her, and brushing the lettuce on her nose or on her tongue trying to get her to walk closer to the door. But Asha's neck can stretch really far... We ended up (hahaha, LOREN ended up) getting the front parts of the front hooves painted. And they looked dark and shiny instead of dirty and clumpy. Asha got to eat three heads of lettuce!!

Then we went and cleaned up the zebra/ostrich barn and exhibit. Denise lost her whistle sometime, so we walked around the exhibit looking for it. I wonder what the zoo visitors thought. The baby zebra, Kebibe (Ka-bee-bee), was being funny. He was running next to the truck, and then running a lap around the exhibit every now and then. When he runs, he gallops a few steps, then kicks both his back legs out and to the side, gallops, kicks!, gallops, kicks!... It looks really fun! I didn't recognize all the noises, but Denise said, "He's always running and farting, running and farting." :-) hahaha.

Have I told you about Rosa yet? She's a lemur that is having kidney problems right now, so she's been in the clinic for a month. It's important that they keep weight on her so they're trying to find things that she likes to eat. They try things like fruit, baby food, puddings, yogurt, pie filling, muffins and Ensure. Lemurs like sweet foods.

Usually Rosa sits on a bench in her cage while we take her food in. This time, after we closed the door to her cage, she ran up the chain link wall, and climbed up to about my shoulder level. Denise told me, she wants you to pet her. !! Cool! So I got to scratch her head and stroke her little hands and feet, I pet her arms and scratched behind her ears some more. It was really cool!

It was a fun zoo day. There's one more story, but it'll have to wait until later.

Stories about Giraffes

I didn't go to the zoo this weekend because my friends Stephen and Rachael Patterson got married!!! AH! Great wedding! Even though I wasn't there this weekend, I have some stories up my sleeve. Tonight we're learnin' about the giraffes...

It starts in the food room. The Night Keepers (NKs) prepare all the food during their shift each night, so we just have to load it onto the truck. We get two buckets of giraffe pellets and two heads of romaine lettuce for the giraffes. Then we drive over to the giraffe barn and back up to the people-sized door. Let me explain how the barn is set up. Imagine a tall, square building. Inside, there are 4 chambers made out of floor to ceiling chain link fence. The largest chamber takes up about a third of the building and is at the front where the giraffes come into the barn from the exhibit. That's the common area for the giraffes. When the giraffes come into the common area, they can hang out in there, or go to one of the smaller chambers; those giraffe-size doors are on the left and right sides of the back wall of the common chamber. There is a people-size hallway that goes from the back door of the building, between the two individual chambers, and end at a door to the common area. So, when I walk into the back/people door, there is an individual chamber to my left, and individual chamber to my right, and I can walk down the hallway, into the common chamber, and out into the exhibit.

Usually when we go into the barn, the giraffes are hanging out in the common chamber. The idea is to get them fed and get them into the exhibit. Their feeding buckets and water fountains are in the individual chambers. So we call them and lure them with lettuce to a chamber. Then we get to feed them pieces of lettuce! I tear off a whole leaf and hold it high in the air while the giraffe wraps her long black tongue around the leaf/my hand and uses her giant lips to find pull the leaf into her mouth. That all happens really fast, and I have to hurry to yank another leaf off and get it high in the air. She can eat them as fast as I can pull them off and shove them up there. Sometime I get a big giraffe burp in my face and I always get giraffe slobber on my hand. :-) Then when I get down to the core of the lettuce head, I hold that up there and try to hold on while she chomps and pulls on it. In the wild, they have to pull their food off trees, so we're supposed to give them some resistance. Yikes! The zoo keeper likes to grab their upper lip when they're finished and shake it (like you would grab a baby's cheek and shake it) and say, "Good girl!"

They're both girls. Their names are Asha (ah-sha) and Punk. I think the zoo officials officially renamed Punk Taylor, but Punk suits her better. She doesn't like to go into the individual chamber and she makes a mess with her pellets! She dunks her mouth in her fountain every time she eats some pellets and makes everything mushy. I can tell them apart because Asha looks older and her spots are lighter.

Oh, I forgot about the pellets. Before we lure them into the individual chambers, we dump a bucket of pellets in their dish. They have rubber dishes that are clipped high up on the chain-link fence. I have to climb a ladder to dump the food in there.

Alright, so they eat the lettuce, then they start on their pellets. That's when Denise and I take our rakes and a trash can out into the exhibit. Giraffe poop is not stinky, but it's all over the place. They poop out tiny hard balls of poop while they walk around. So we try to rake up these dark marbles that roll all over the place. When it's dry outside it's easier, but when it's muddy, it's almost impossible to find them all! So we try to rake everything into piles, then we get the shovel and shovel them into the trash can. It's best to start far from the door that way by the time the trash can gets heavy, you're close to the door!

When the exhibit is clean and the giraffes are done eating, we send them outside. Then we get two flakes of hay and some flakes of alfalfa, and take them up the bride over the exhibit. There's a basket that hangs off the side of the bridge and we drop them down there. I have missed yet!

Then we have to go back into the empty exhibit and clean up all the poop balls that they've stomped into the rocky floor. The floor is like those sidewalks that are made out of pebbles. We use a high-powered water hose to blast the poop out and send it down the drain. This rinsing job is pretty tricky. You have to think about keeping the water off your feet and keeping it pointed at the drain no matter where the poop is. So I end up walking in circles for a long time and getting soaked from the knees down. My first time was pretty bad. I think I'm getting better. Sometimes Denise rinses and I wash the rubber dishes and the drinking fountains. The first time I rinsed the barn, she just told me to rinse the barn. I did it, it was messy, and I learned some things. I think I tend to over-instruct.

So, now you can go do the giraffe thing! The best part is the lettuce.