#zookeeper internship

Feeding the beavers has to be one of the biggest highlights of my day ❤️ this is mom and dad

I think my hands are forever going to smell like meat and fish. #diets

I'm happy to announce that I've recently hit over 300 followers!!! Thank you to everyone who feels my blog is worth following :D I promise that in few months, my blog is going to get a lot more interesting ;) (yay for internships!) I'm currently being interviewed by several different zoos for various internships! I'll release a bit more info once all interviews are wrapped up :D

Well, I've been back in Utah for over a week. The decision to spend my summer in Colorado Springs at Cheyenne Mountain Zoo was the best I could have made. Some of the other interns and I were able to take this picture before we left. ❤️

Weighing Hank the ring tail lemur!!!

Weighing Stewart the ring tailed lemur!!!

So I had the opportunity last week to watch our wonderful vets do a check up on the marmosets! The marmosets were being moved from quarantine down to their new home in primate world! Before they moved them down, they wanted to do a check up to make sure all was well! It was very interesting to watch and I learned a ton!

Okay! This is going to be a lot because I was too tired to make a post yesterday but........ LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT MY FIRST TWO DAYS! Yesterday was orientation and of course there was a lot of talking and a lot of paperwork and reading or manuals BUT I took a small tour of the zoo with the other interns who seem super nice! We friended each other on Facebook and we're talking about going hiking and other fun things! After the tour I met my keeper and she introduced me to the area and to the animals. I watched two of my keepers do a tapir demo which was super awesome! The got in the enclosure with them and did some training and afterward we let a kid that was super interested and asked a lot of great questions give one of the tapirs a scratch! I'm going to go on a tangent here but this is why I love the zoo I'm interning at. The keepers work really hard to make sure all the guests have a good experience and have opportunities to get close to the animals (all within the safety of a watchful keeper.) their Moto is literally "every kid. Every time. Goosebumps!" After the tapirs I got to watch a training session with the ruffed lemurs and I also went with a keeper to take pm diets to the tapirs and bears and we locked everything up for the night! SECOND DAY! This morning I went to the keeper meeting where each animal area talks about what's going on in their areas and then I went with my keeper, Rick, to go greet the monkeys for the morning. I helped with spot cleaning (cleaning old food, feces and enrichment in enclosures). WE INTRODUCED A NEW SLOTH TO THE AREA! We got a new male sloth named Bosco for a breeding recommendation with out female, Chalupa! We let Bosco and Chalupa in the same area for the first time and it took a bit but Bosco eventually made his way over to Chalupa. She was unsure so she bared her teeth and he backed off. They did this several times and finally, an hour later they went off to separate Hammocks and fell asleep because that was exhausting from a sloths standpoint! XD After that I helped prep bear diet and got to see some more training! I told my keepers that I'm interested in training and speaking to the public (demos, keeper talks, etc) and they have been GREAT at catering to my interests. I went with Rick to go watch some meerkat training! They're training their meerkats to voluntarily enter into tubes and hold still for ex rays! Amazing work they're doing! Rick and I talked forever about training and then it was time to distribute pm diets and lock up!!!