Rounding up Turtles and Herding Camels

January 25, 2012

You know when really weird unexpected things happen and you wonder if you are seeing them correctly. This happened to me on my nightly stroll through the zoo tonight. As I turned the corner of the yellow baboon exhibit I found 3 large dromedary camels coming at me down the path way. I immediately stopped gasped and then grabbed my phone to call the head keeper. I had the feeling that the camels had not be given permission to take nightly jaunts around the zoo and three fully grown camels were more than I wanted to take on at the moment, especially I don’t know them very well as of yet. I also knew that we had a 4^th camel somewhere; so as the first three I saw continued down the path I started my search for the last one as I awaited keepers to arrive. I did find him still chowing down in the makeshift camel exhibit (they were recently put in an empty field between a couple of the exhibits to “cut the grass”). Knowing where that one was I turned around and began to follow the other three, curious to where they were going. As it turned out they were on their way to the goat exhibit which is also the old exhibit they used to be in and I guess they had just decided that it was time for a visit. The keepers showed up and we escorted the last male into the goat exhibit with everyone else until we could get the fence fixed. The goats were rather upset about having their peaceful evening upset by 4 large camels coming in and taking over their barn. The mothers who have young goatlits were the most upset, especially the one who had just given birth yesterday.

Today seemed to be the day for rounding up animals. I am currently working on updating the Munda Wanga collection list, this has not been done in the last couple of years and some of the keepers don’t even know how many animals they should have in each exhibit. I started today with reptiles since I thought it would be an easy category to start with. The Crocodiles, no problem, 3 males and 2 females, easy peasy. The yellow tortoises were another story entirely. Myself and their two keepers spent about ½ an hour just rounding them up from around their very over grown and large exhibit. I almost stepped on one while I was looking. Jeff, one of the keepers even climbed into their den to pull them out. And it’s not like once you rounded them up to one area they were going to sit there patiently, oh no they all go taking off into different direction, moving faster than you think a tortoise should be able to move . It’s like herding cats and some of the big girls were surprisingly heavy. As we found out once we started sexing them (determining if they were male or female) and counting them we had 28 females and 12 males; 40 leopard tortoises in total. We were all laughing by the time we were through.

Yesterday I scheduled a surprise treat for all of the keepers as a thank you for doing such hard work on the daily’s that I introduced last week. I made apple crisp, another local volunteer made brownies, and one of the vet volunteers bought sodas. Again the keepers were really thrilled and are starting to believe that positive change is coming their way. I was also able to get up the new signs in the keeper office I am attempting to revamp so little things keep happening:)

As for the baby animal news, Coco is continuing to do better and better with other Vervets. In fact both last night and this evening I witnessed him cuddling with the other female and grooming each other, such a positive step! In just 2 weeks we are going to be able to introduce 3 other Vervets that have also been in quarantine that were all pets gone wrong.

The Kitten is also doing very well although she is no longer a little girl she is a he and one of the vet volunteers proposed the name Darwin to replace Arwin, but I am leaning toward Galahad myself because he has the heart and soul of an honest knight.

My only regret about the past couple of days is that I haven’t had my camera with me. I am going to have to start carrying it all times just so I can capture all the unique experiences that keep happening to me here at Munda Wanga. That’s all for tonight I will continue to update about the weird and wacky world in which I find myself living. Love and miss you all, Tammy