We do several Emergency Training Drills a year and a closed Monday is the perfect opportunity. I recently wrote about lemur tracking, we also do full on drills that include fake animal escapes and or damage due to storms or trees down, you might recall when Leslie played a bear. Today’s post is about making darts.

We would potentially use a dart to sedate an escaped bear and maybe even a wolf. Our dart bags are labeled well but without practice it’s a very nerve raking experience. Here you can see several people in different stages of making darts. We of course use water as our “drug” during drills and depending on the size of the animal we would be darting, the amount of “drugs” vary. So we practice making lots and lots of darts, for all the potential animal sizes. Afterwards we go outside and practice shooting them into a target- no not one of Sherry’s stuffed animals. In the event of a real emergency there always has to be two people making darts together. So during practice we pair up in teams.

Several of us making darts, can you pick out the non-keepers in the picture?

Sarah and Maya making darts

Marilyn focusing on her darts

Annie, Katy, and Jessi

You can see the back of Mike in this picture practicing with us

Next, we went outside and practiced shooting our darts into two targets.

We make a radio call alerting all staff of our plans so no one accidentally walks out or wonders what in the world we are doing.

Oops Jessi missed the target

Check out this previous post about his strange napping habits.

This particular sleeping position was excitedly pointed out to me by one of our latest interns Jamie.

Check him out:

Godzilla has no issues getting comfortable

Me, Sarah, Kent, and Aaron begin Lemur tracking

Sarah picking up a strong signal behind the Donkey/Goat yard

Aaron went into the woods between alpaca and pigs to see what he could pick up on his tracker

Duck was curious about Aaron in the woods

As was Max

We then decided to go out to the parking lot since our signal was pointing us in that direction.

Quickly there after,  we found the first lemur in a tree.

The first lemur was found in a tree

After feeling successful about finding the first lemur so quickly we decided to split up at the boardwalk. Sarah and I headed to Explore the Wild and Aaron and Kent headed to Catch the Wind. Shortly there after,  the guys radioed us to meet them at the Into the Mist exhibit. Kent had spotted the second lemur on top of an umbrella!

With both lemurs found we headed back to the building

Successful Tracking

RW recovery report. 3.13

“Ewwwwwwww!”

That is one of the most popular words I hear being shouted by children as they watch one of the farmyard animals defecate. But, hey…. we all “do” it. There is that popular book entitled Everyone Poops (that just so happens to be sold in our gift shop) that explains how everyone and everything capable can and will poop.

Poop, can actually be an animal keepers best friend. Now, I don’t go to the movies with a scoop of Scout scat. I just mean that we keepers can tell A LOT about an animal just by looking at its poop.What its eating, if its dehydrated,if they have worms are just some of the benefits of getting close to poo!

In the near future I will be posting some more about poop and will be posting some pics for you guys to identify what animal it came out of!

Don’t get too excited.

Actually, Scout hasn’t rested on this carpet in I-don’t-know-how-long, and Kobi hasn’t slept on my chair until recently when the goat moved to my living room.

From 7 a.m. to noon under the picnic dome at the Museum of Life and Science

Great prices on a huge variety of stuff! And all proceeds benefit our local Piedmont AAZK.