Day 10: Salads!

This morning all of us interns were out in the house woking on cleaning the glass. We were almost done with the whole building when the custodian came in and told us that all the glass was cleaned already. No wonder the glass wasn't as finger printed as normal! After that confusion, it was time to start preparing salads for the day. I started off cutting up the bananas, sweet potatoes, etc. that would be fed to the giant tortoises and a few other turtles. After the vegetables and fruit was cut up I started making the various salads. This morning a few keepers took out eggs from the False Gharial exhibit. The eggs were unfertilized so they let us look at them. The shells of the eggs were amazingly hard, to the point where if you bumped two together it made a sort of clinking noise. During morning break we were talking about a tortoise tour that was coming in for the morning and realized we didn't have any large carrots. One zookeeper quickly put an order in for large carrots while the other intern and I went to the tortoise exhibit to do a quick hose down of the exhibit. There wasn't any salad that needed to be picked up today but there was some hay and some tortoise left behinds. We got the exhibit to be as good as we could get it for the time being right before the tour came. In the few minutes that we were waiting for the tour to arrive a few of us were waiting in the outside enclosure. One visitor was joking around with us that he was looking at the exhibit of humans in their natural habitat. The tour group today was a group of girl scouts who had brought presents for the snakes (such as logs and other enrichment and enclosure items). When the head zookeeper asked them why snakes out of all the other animals, one girl replied, "Because no one ever thinks about snakes." It's true. Snakes are underrepresented and often misrepresented as horrible and mean animals. On the contrary they are anything but that. They bite out of instinct of feeling threatened and to eat food, not just for the sake of bitting. They are amazing creatures and are quite beautiful. I got to help out with the tortoise encounter which was fun because of seeing the kids get excited about being in there and feeding them. After the tour I helped make a few more salads before lunch time. 

After lunch I helped finish up the salads and then distributed the salads to the whole building by myself.   Before, I had only picked up salads, I had never had to lay them out. It was a little confusing at times to figure out what specific salad in which sized tray went to which animal. When I was giving the Pancake Tortoises their food, one of the zookeepers asked if I wanted to handle a snake. I then learned how to correctly pick up the snake and guide it back to its enclosure. I worked with a Black Headed Python, which is really pretty. This snake is pretty docile so they use her for a lot of keeper chats and interactions with the public. It was so cool to be able to hold it and feel how solid and heavy the snake was. I eventually figured it out which salads went where and felt really accomplished when I had all the salads delivered to the right animal! I then went over to the Gila Monster exhibit to help the other intern shovel out more sand that was in there. After the afternoon break I did some sweeping, throwing out trash from the salads, and cleaning of the salad bins. I went into the radiated tortoise exhibit to restock their salad trays and then put the rest of the salad in a bag for one of the other zookeepers to use. I then cleaned out food and water bowls for some McCord's Box Turtles off exhibit. At the end of the day I did the dishes and helped to gather trash from around the building. It was another very full and very busy day, but it went fast!

False Gharial

Black Headed Python

Radiated Tortoise