Work Experience at Folly Farm

Hi guys, today’s blog is about my recent work experience at Folly Farm in South Wales. As many of my readers will know, I spent the month of July doing work experience here, having an amazing time whilst doing so!

Although I have done a couple of different placements before, I still had no idea what to expect! Every collection is completely different to work at, and I feel that it is important that I have learnt how similar animals are managed by different collections. So on my first day, after my induction, I was delighted to find that I would be working with the critically endangered Eastern black rhino. Folly Farm is home to two lovely rhinos, Nkosi and Manyara. Nkosi came from Port Lympe and is quite young at 5 years of age, and Manyara who is 17 years old, who came from Chester Zoo. They are hoping to have a new breeding female join the collection very soon, as Manyara unfortunately cannot breed due to health reasons. Working with the rhinos was incredibly rewarding, as after all the cleaning in the morning, we were able to collect browse and use enrichment feeders to hang it up. I was really quite surprised that nettles aren’t actually good for rhinos to eat, whereas giraffes cannot get enough of them! Working with the rhinos was absolutely amazing and I was lucky enough to get to work with them a few times during my placement.

Training session with Nkosi 

On my second day, I was thrown in the deep end with the giraffes! I have never worked with such a huge straw bed in my life – I was half tempted to hide in the bed and have a nap in the afternoon! Giraffes are hard work, but they are amazing animals and worth it! Folly Farm holds 4 male hybrid giraffes – Zulu (the biggest), Rian (naughty), Sillan (cheeky), and Tahaqua (nervous), and they all seem to get on quite well! I worked with the giraffes quite a lot during my placement and was able to help out with training too! The giraffes are shut inside overnight and are provided with various enrichment items to keep them busy! We even tried marmite smeared in a tube and it went down well! In addition to the giraffes, chapman’s zebra, nile lechwe, guinea fowl and dwarf mongoose make up the section – it’s really quite large and I have huge respect for the keeper on this section!

Feeding the giraffes during the talk 

I really enjoyed working with all the animals in the zoo, and each species had their own personality! The penguin keepers introduced me to the 6 penguin chicks who were just learning to catch fish underwater! All named after Simpson’s characters, they were quite the hit with the public. In the four weeks I was there, all chicks had learnt how to catch fish underwater and in the week after I left, they all headed off down South to another collection to grow up and have their own families! Whilst I was there, the fossa and bongo headed off to other collections as part of breeding recommendations, which really showed how well good zoos contribute towards conservation.

The colony of Humboldt penguins are fed multiple times per day!

One of the largest sections on the zoo was the bird section. Such a diverse section, I worked with birds I had never even heard of before! Helping out with rebranching and training was really rewarding and I learnt so much about enclosure design and animal training too. I think the ducks and the ne ne geese were my favourite on this section – ducks are just hilarious! I was also shown incubation which was awesome – they were incubating lots of different chicken eggs when I left. I never knew how hard birds were to care for! Such specialised diets and husbandry requirements. The other large section was the small mammals section, which, like the bird section, was spread out throughout the whole zoo! Both groups of meerkats had new pups born in my time there -  very exciting! The section was so diverse, and it was really cool to see the cusimanse and have the chance to work with them – I love the noise they make when they’re given food, similar to the grunt/bark of a meerkat, but angrier.

Cusimanse! 

Folly interactive is an indoor exhibit, featuring many different reptiles, invertebrates, birds, amphibians, a sloth and some Rodrigues fruit bats. I really did enjoy working with the bats – after spending 3 months on the twilight section at Chester last year, I grew to miss the fluffy, flying potatoes! (I once saw a photo of a bat and it looked like a potato with wings, trust me). I was able to assist with the redesigning of an enclosure in Folly interactive, as well as learn about many different husbandry techniques for different species – I did however steer well clear of the tarantulas!

I was really lucky to be able to work with the carnivores a few times during my placement, something I massively enjoyed – I think I’m a carnivore girl at heart! I was able to watch and take part in training with Hugo, the male lion, and was also shown how you would train an animal to present part of its body for health checks or injections. I feel as though this is something I can definitely use in my future career. As I work with small carnivores at my part-time job, it was great to discuss diets, training, behaviour, enrichment etc and I have been able to actually use these to develop new enrichment with the animals at work.

Training Hugo

The last section I worked on was the primates. Again, this section was spread out across the whole zoo and included 3 types of lemur (red ruffed, ring tailed and black and white ruffed), common marmosets, barbary macaques, squirrel monkeys, white faced saki monkeys, red handed tamarin and a grey legged douroucouli, who’s enclosure I was able to help with redesigning! The primates were great to work with – they all had different personalities! The barbary macaques are all ex-pets/rescued, but do really well at Folly – you wouldn’t know their past unless you were told this! Primate poo is still one of the worst types of poo I have experienced, which is a shame because otherwise, primates are great fun to work with.

Overall, I had an absolutely amazing 4 weeks, and I definitely did not want to leave. It was a great experience and I couldn’t recommend the collection enough! All the keepers were easy to get along with and so willing to share their expertise! If any of the keepers end up reading this, I want to say a massive thank you for everything.

National Zookeeper Week!

Hi guys! Hope you’ve been really enjoying my posts so far. As some of you may know, this week is National Zookeeper Week!

This started in America, with the AAK (American Association of Zookeepers) having an annual celebration in the third week of July each year! This year it falls between the 18^th and 23^rd of July, and is a week dedicated to zookeepers! The celebration hopes to raise the profile of zoo and aquarium keepers throughout the year, and recognise all the hard work they do to look after and conserve many endangered species.

Amur tiger at Leipzig Zoo

Zookeepers work 365 days a year, working long hours, to care for many incredible species! Many work on Christmas day and New Year’s Day, but it doesn’t phase them! Extreme weather conditions are also a battle, but zookeepers power through because their animals need them! As well as the well known job of picking up poo, keepers are also great observers, able to notice the slightest change in an animal. They are nutritionists, constantly changing diets to suit the species, animal trainers, heavy lifters, gardeners, DIY experts, able to solve problems, and most of all, hard working.

Lots of keepers have also published academic papers regarding topics such as behaviour, enrichment, training, husbandry and diets, among others. These papers help other collections manage their animals, sharing ideas on what works, and what doesn’t work, as well as how different individuals of the same species can be so diverse in personality.

ABWAK logo

Here in the UK, we have ABWAK (Association of British and Irish Wild Animal Keepers), which many of UK keepers are members of! It’s great for organising workshops, and as mentioned in a previous post, holds an annual symposium (gathering of zookeepers!) All members of ABWAK are also automatic members of the International Congress of Zookeepers (ICZ), which aims to connect keepers worldwide. The international sharing of information really benefits all collections involved, conserving worldwide biodiversity. The ICZ also hold congress’, with the most recent one being held at Leipzig Zoo last September (2015). After speaking to those who went, it sounded like an absolutely awesome event, something I wish I had attended!

ICZ logo

Anyway, enough of my rambling, Happy National Zookeeper Week to all the keepers out there!

Manor Wildlife Park

So, whilst I’m on work placement at Folly Farm, I thought I would take a visit to the nearby Manor Wildlife Park! Also known as Anna’s Welsh Zoo, it is the sister zoo to Peak Wildlife Park in Derbyshire. Parking for the zoo is just next to the zoo itself, which was incredibly useful! Upon entering, I was happy to find that they accepted my professional ABWAK card as entry, to which I was very grateful – I made sure to pop my loose change into donation boxes around the zoo.

The first exhibit I came across was ‘Wander with the Wallabies’, a Bennett’s wallaby walkthrough, where I was able to stroke a wallaby! This is encouraged as long as visitors stay on the path and don’t upset the wallabies whilst doing so. The walkthrough was large, with many trees, logs and lots of hiding places for the wallabies! This was my first impression of the zoo and it was great, I was looking forward to seeing what was next! There were hand washing facilities outside and many dotted throughout the park encouraging hygiene and stopping the spread of germs!

Giving a Bennett's wallaby a tickle!

I continued down the path to ‘Camel Corner’, spotting a group of Bactrian camels enjoying grazing out on the paddock. Opposite the camels were scimitar horned oryx, rhea and Przewalski’s horses, all in large paddocks. The signage surrounding the oryx told the story of how this species was saved from extinction with captive breeding, and it does really well to promote good zoos. I must say, the signage was really good! (I think my only comment would be calling common marmosets, ‘white tufted ear marmosets’!)

I then walked uphill with the stunning Southern white rhino to my left, in a mixed species exhibit with Damara zebra and ostrich. Even though it was raining, none of the animals seemed phased by it and continued grazing! This mixed species exhibit was huge, sporting many wallows and a large shelter for the animals to use if they so wished. Again, the signage around the enclosure was really informative, promoting the work of Save the Rhino International, something I am hugely passionate about (I have a ‘thick skinned and horny’ sticker in my car!)

Southern White Rhino having a munch on some grass!

The path down from the rhinos took me to the ‘Valley of the Apes’ where 3 siamang gibbons were happily playing around in the trees. An island enclosure, sporting lots of height, long grass and platforms for sunbathing, this enclosure houses Steve, a siamang gibbon success story. Before Anna Ryder-Richardson bought and re-established this zoo, Steve lived in an enclosure that was incredibly small for a siamang (macaws now live happily in there), before being moved to this spacious enclosure. As a visitor, this exhibit is within woodland habitat, with a couple of benches where you can sit and watch the siamangs and the native wildlife in the trees. Leaving the valley of the apes (which again, has amazing signage), I passed an island which is the home to common marmosets, which I was unable to spot! 

Amazing signage detailing the different primate species!

The path came back round to the oryx, passing tapirs and llamas, housed next to the beautiful, elusive, female Sumatran tiger, Terima. Terima is a young Sumatran tiger, arriving at the zoo from France last year, and she lives in a large enclosure with feeding poles, plants, hideaways, and it can be split into two if needed. After speaking to one of the keepers, Amy, I was delighted to hear that Terima has important genes, and that they are hoping to take on a male Sumatran tiger from Chester Zoo in the hope of forming a breeding pair, contributing to the EEP for this species. On the day of my visit, Terima was in her back paddock, slightly off show – apparently she’s a feisty cat!

Sumatran tiger, Terima

I carried on through the woodland paths, past the emu (occasionally booming) to ‘meerkat mountain’. I was lucky enough to catch the meerkats at feeding time, where they were happily munching on mixed veg. Meerkats are common in zoos, though it is nice to see how different collections keep them. The ‘African Village’ was next to see, which was a walkthrough of various chickens, pygmy goats, Cameroon sheep and kune kune pigs in an fenced off area (pigs can be dangerous!) There was also a giant rabbit walkthrough nearby, with lots of bunnies having a good sunbathe!

Meerkat on sentry duty!

My last stop on my visit was the ‘Lemur walk through’, which was home to ring tailed lemurs, red fronted lemurs, red bellied lemurs and red ruffed lemurs all living happily together. Whilst I was there, I spoke to a keeper who was also a student, studying the behaviour of lemurs in response to various enrichment devices she had implemented into the enclosure. On this particular day, she was looking at basket enrichment. Two woven baskets were filled with hay and food, cable tied together and hung on a rope. The ring tailed lemurs and the red ruffed lemurs were investigating this enrichment, but didn’t seem to have the hang of it just yet! As I walked around the enclosure, I spotted a red bellied lemur baby! It was so small and so cute, bounding around the trees! Though I have worked with red bellies before, I had never seen a baby one!

Although not a large zoo, and only taking a couple of hours to get round, I really enjoyed my visit. It is perfect for a day with young children as it is not a full day out and is also not too busy. The conservation message throughout the park is strong and consistent, and really does promote good zoos and ways that conservation can be done at home. I made sure to grab a magnet from the shop, to add to my zoo magnet collection, and I will hope to visit again in the future. If you are in South Wales, definitely add this one to the visit list (along with Folly Farm!)

I made a video montage of my visit, in case you want a small taster!