Diet prep time! Here is what a typical produce haul looks like for the birds, tortoises, and herbivorous/omnivorous lizards in our care. In addition to the variety of fresh fruits and veggies pictured, 3-4lbs of leafy greens go into each feeding. A variety of fresh foods are a crucial husbandry aspect for most exotic pets; malnutrition, obesity, and deficiency are some of the most common ailments suffered by birds and reptiles in captivity.

Unfortunately, there is a lot of misinformation out there on proper feeding, particularly where birds are concerned. Did you know that the bird seed mixes marketed in pet stores as a complete diet can have deadly health consequences like heart and liver disease when fed as sole or even primary nutrition? That includes feeding little birds like budgies and cockatiels.

Less exotic animals benefit from fresh foods as well. Rabbits and guinea pigs should have leafy greens and produce as part of their regular diet, and "pocket pets" like hamsters and mice are healthiest with a varied diet including fresh ingredients (that can include insects!).

I just watched this cool Buzzfeed video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ec-qGLAnReg

I’m going to go to bed at 9:30 tonight, after a relaxing shower, some reading and a bit of meditation.

Tomorrow morning I’m going to wake up at 4am and:

check my emails

do a short yoga video

eat a decent breakfast

drink lots of water

start some of my essay

This whole thing is about using my time more wisely, even during the holidays! I’ll post updates and let you know how I get on!

Wish me luck!

Love,

Food/Diet/Fish Prep! Every animal facility does this in some form. Whether you’re prepping in the AM or the PM all the animals gotta eat. Some facilities have a designated person or team (often called commissary keepers) that are in charge of making sure that all the animals get the diets they need each day. Many others, however, do not and instead the team that feeds the animals must also prepare the food. Regardless of how the facility is run, there are certain types of Food Preppers that seem to make their way into every kitchen. You may not recognize it right away but most people seem to fall into one or two of eight categories that I’ve identified (and created nifty little profiles for). Let’s see if you can match up yourself or some of your co-workers!

The Rookie:  Everyone starts out as this one. Ready to learn about animal diets and how the food goes from fridge or bag to bowl or bucket and into the mouths/paws/hands of the animals you love. Rookies tend to be very nervous at first. You often see them coming into the kitchen with that crooked sort of half smile. They’re new and don’t want to make any mistakes.  Understandable and because of this the Rookie becomes very thorough. This is great for the animals. No seeds or bad fish make their way into the diets the Rookie makes. The major drawback is that because they’re still learning and are triple checking their work they tend to drag behind. They mean well but don’t have the experience yet to get the speed necessary most days. Rookies benefit from lots of guidance and patience. Teach them the little-known shortcuts to help them pick up the pace.

The Veteran: These guys have been around the block a few times. They’re seasoned and very knowledgeable. These are usually the ones that train you to make diets. They know what it takes to get the job done and readily pass it on to others. The downside is that this can result in a lot of “Do as I say, not as I do” moments. They are usually stuck in their ways and their confidence can backfire on them causing them to miss things. Veterans are highly successful on their own but when paired with someone who will respect them and double check their work the Veterans’ product is perfection. 

The Artist: True to form the Artist takes food and makes a masterpiece. The diets from their kitchen are often elaborate and exciting. These are the ones cutting apples into stars, making feeders out of watermelon, and adding jello eggs to fish buckets. They provide great variety and enriching diets for the animals. These art pieces often cause the Artist to become consumed in the details which can result in a waste of time. Does the meat really need to be cut into the shape of the number 3? Not if it’s 15 minutes to feeding time. Allow the Artists to flourish and produce great work, but be there to help nudge them or pick up the slack while they work on their creation.

The Monk: Silent and devout, the Monk is ever striving for peace and perfection. Monks are workhorses never stopping until the job is done. You can always count on these people to be focused on the task at hand. They’re usually so silently focused that they’re forgotten about. This is great for creating a calming work environment on a busy day, but can really hurt co-workers who don’t receive any sort of information from the Monk. Make sure you keep tabs on what the Monks are doing so you don’t do extra work. They’re not likely to tell you when they’ve finished something and will instead just move on to the next task. 

The Lieutenant: There is no greater force in the kitchen than the Lieutenant. They have a plan, a process, and a near flawless execution. Their kitchen is in ship shape from start to finish. They also tend to be the cleanest. That being said, don’t drop in any surprises to this mess hall. Changes to routine and disruptions to workflow can really set off Lieutenants. So much so it might be difficult for them to get back on track for the duration of food prep. I’d recommend keeping distractions to a minimum and doing your best to allow Lieutenants their space. You can help them be more flexible by easing them into change by presenting small different tasks in the midst of routine.

The Free Spirit: If you wanna have a good time these are the ones you call for the job. Just as their moniker would suggest the Free Spirit is a fun-loving, no-stress-having, kind of worker. They go with the flow and easily adapt to problems and adjustments. They’re great for bonding moments through story-telling and jamming to music. Free Spirits are often the ones to show you how to make food prep fun. Especially if it means eating a blueberry or two here and there. On the flip side, all this fun comes with the cost of productivity. Sometimes the Free Spirit is too busy picking a radio station or tossing grapes in the air to hurry things along. Their workstation is more often than not a complete mess and this can result in mishaps with diets. Allow the Free Spirits to play their music and have a good time but make sure you’re prepared to put the diets in the right bucket or edit mistakes.

The Sheep: If you need someone to come in and lend a hand in the kitchen then the Sheep is the one for you. These preppers are great at taking directions with precision and accuracy. They are willing to help out in any situation and take on whatever role is needed. Sheep are usually rookies for the shortest amount of time because they listen so well. Unfortunately, by taking all these directions, Sheep tend not to think for themselves. They tend to forget what to do next and ask a lot of questions. Even those questions that seem to be answered by common sense. They have the knowledge in their head but any sort of pressure to think on their own and take charge of a situation causes them to get nervous and falter. If you’re working with a Sheep the best course of action is to provide constant guidance. Tell them what to do next as soon as they finish with one step. They’re eager to help. Make sure you tell them how to do so.

The Loose Cannon: Watch out for these guys. A Loose Cannon is going to come into the kitchen with their own set of rules and charge through to victory. High energy and a drive for results creates a force to be reckoned with in the Loose Cannon. Because they have their own way of doing things they often get people thinking about why things are done the way they are and promote new ideas. Much like the Loose Cannon from every police drama these preppers are after results and aren’t interested in rules that get in their way. This can cause all kinds of problems, especially with supervisors. These preppers are also highly unpredictable. You never know what they’re going to be focusing on or where they’re going next. This keeps you on your toes and makes you a more adaptable diet maker. Stand clear of the Loose Cannons. Feed off of their energy and you’ll speed through your work. Try and reel them back to the rules when you can, but know that they’ve got their own rule book and they’re going to stick by it.

So what are you? You can be any one or more of those and you might even change a couple times. None of these types is inherently better than the others. If you didn’t notice they all balance each other out. The right combination of these food preppers can create the perfect kitchen. But in the event you catch yourself in the kitchen with someone you find... less than desirable, take a minute to think about what kind of prepper they might be and think about how you can help complement their strengths and weaknesses with your own. 

OH BOY HOWDY is this gonna ever be the loooooongest response you never wanted. My department (Animal Care) has a hand in preparing and delivering the fish to every single marine mammal area in the park whether we work with those animals directly or not. There are two early-early shifts. The Wild Arctic food prep shift which starts at 4AM, and the North Food Prep (NFP) shift that begins even earlier. Wild Arctic has a big enough freezer to stockpile food for about a week. The other mammal areas do not have big freezers of their own, so they rely on things to be delivered from the main Zoological Operations Commissary. The following includes only food prep for the marine mammals who specifically eat fish. The manatees have their own lettuce cooler. 

For the NFP shift, two or three Animal Care staffers arrive at the main commissary at 3:00AM, sometimes 2:30 if there are manatee calves who need fed around the clock. These two or three people will handle an average of 3000lbs of fish during the shift. There are medical procedures to be done in the morning, and first training sessions and feeds often start as early as 7:00AM. So, this all has to be done and over with as fast as humanly possible. It’s a lot of fish, dudes. I’ll use capelin as an example. Right now we are thawing 62 boxes (flats) of capelin which are 22lbs each. This does not include the still-frozen boxes delivered to Whale and Dolphin Theater and Sea Lion and Otter Stadium. It’s a lot, and that’s JUST the capelin.

When you first arrive at the shift, probably yawning and maybe momentarily questioning your life choices, you immediately begin the “break out”. Which is the process of pulling out the racks of fish from the cooler that’s been thawing for 24hrs and getting all of the still-actually-very-frozen fish into the sinks to begin the water thaw. While it’s thawing, you wash the racks and scrub the floor of the cooler. The boxes the fish were packed in are flattened and taken to the recycling center at some point during the deliveries.

Next, we grab the pallet jack and go into the freezer to get the pallets of fish boxes (we call them flats…because they are sort of flat I guess?) that were made by the shift the day before.  It’s about -20ºF in there, and windy from the blowers, and you’re probably already wet. So it feels…nice. You wheel the whole pallet into the kitchen and load up the racks for the next day and push them all back into the cooler. Rinse and repeat. There are two pallets worth that need to go on the racks each day. 

Tired? LOL TOO BAD! Next, you drain the water from the sinks and start bucketing the fish. While one person is weighing out individual diets for the animals we specifically care for (like the otters and dolphins in the back area and Dolphin Nursery) the other person is loading up buckets which are clustered in rows based on where they’ve gotta go. We have a big board that tells us who needs what and how many buckets go where, but generally we count out stacks of buckets the day before so the poor tired 3AM person doesn’t have to brain too much. We do 30# buckets of capelin and 25# buckets of herring. We do this by feel so we don’t have to sit there and weigh each one. AIN’T NOBODY GOT TIME FOR THAT. Generally you use a 5gal bucket to scoop the fish out and then pour it into the buckets on the floor. Picture the motion of quickly flipping a bucket when making a sand castle. The buckets of fish are then iced and loaded up onto a truck with a flat metal bed and delivered to the stadiums. There, the trainers weigh out individual diets using what we brought.

At some point, you or your compadre may have ducked out to bottle feed any baby manatees before coming back into The Battle. 

The dolphin stadium does not get any thawed fish. There’s a pallet in our freezer (again, sorted the day before) of frozen boxes for them. We load that up in either a golf cart or the truck depending on preference and deliver the frozen flats to them. They leave the empty rack out for us and we load it and push it into their cooler for them. That’s the stuff they’ll be using the NEXT day as they’ve got the stuff in the cooler we brought the day before that’s been thawing for 24hrs. They have a big enough kitchen that they can do the thaw themselves.

The sea lion stadium shares a kitchen and cooler with the pacific point habitat. They get half and half thawed buckets and frozen flats. They have their own pallet in the freezer, too.

Shamu gets an Imperial buttload of thawed fish in buckets…It’s in the ballpark of 1000lbs a day. We drive it over there and the Night Watch Trainer helps us unload and then they immediately begin weighing out the killer whales’ individual diets. We then drive off into the…shit it’s nowhere near sunrise yet.

Dolphin Cove gets thawed buckets delivered as well. This used to be an Animal Care area from 1996-2015 until Training took over.

We also make up one random 10lbs bucket of capelin for aviculture. This is used for any fish-eating birds they have in rehabilitation. 

Exhausted? Suck it up, buttercup! It’s time to CLEAN ALL THE THINGS! So now you clean the commissary A.K.A. “Fish House” because it looks like it’s been hit by a scaly, fishy tornado. Better not leave even a single herring scale stuck to any of the surfaces in there!

At this point, it’s about 6:00AM. We do all that in 3 HOURS. You gotta MOVE, man. This is not a slow, sleepy activity. It’s like the most hardcore thing some fitness coach could ever imagine, but more smelly and with weirder weights. The dude who does Insanity would have a proud tear in his eye.

If you are lucky, you will now have time to take a shower. Pray there is time, because you’ve probably got fish gak all over you, herring scales stuck all over any exposed skin, and fishy water and herring blood down your boots. You smell so bad that your own mother would question her love for you. 

If you try extra hard, you might be able to scrub away 80% of the stench of an entire Gloucester commercial fishing port from your body and maybe cram a protein bar into your face before it’s time for the first round of feeds and/or any morning medical procedures or animal moves that are scheduled. The dolphins need breakfast and require prompt and friendly service or they’ll blast you on Yelp. So have fun getting that already-wet body into your wetsuit! Do the dance. DO IT! Maybe take a moment to admire the giant bucket bruises on your legs. These come from the bucket rims repeatedly hitting you in the same place on your thighs as you carry them. You earned them summabitches and you should be proud.

At some point during your shift (you’re there until 11:30 or 12:30 depending, it’s a long day) you gotta bundle up and go into the freezer to “make pallets”. Basically building fish flat pallets to be used in this same process the next day. If you’ve been keeping track, this means that between breakout, re-filling the cooler racks, and making up pallets for the next day you and your co-worker(s) have basically lifted and thrown around 3000lbs of fish THREE TIMES. 

Safe Storage For Food Preppers

Food Storage

When I tell people what I cook for the week, often times people’s first response is “won’t it go bad?” If you don’t have a husband that eats your weight in meat, then you may want to divide your cook days up, freeze some of it, or trim down the food prep a bit. Below are some recommended storage times from Food Safety so you can determine how much you should cook at once.

Safe…