Quotes from a Day in the Life of a Zookeeper

Those of us who work in the zoo field become accustomed to things that most people just don't see in a regular day...or lifetime. Here is a glimpse into the daily conversations that simply don't (and shouldn't!) happen anywhere else. If you're part of the zoo world yourself, you are probably already familiar with quotes like these:

Rather exuberantly: "When the chicks are frozen, you can pop their heads right off!"

"Will you pass me that fish head, please?"

"What kind of pee is in the hallway?"

"Sorry I can't do that right now--I have to take the armadillo to a birthday party."

"Let me change my shoes really fast because the kookaburra hates these boots."


And try asking this question in the office to see how many volunteers you get: "Who wants to eat these beetles?!"

Aan aadorable aardvark does, aamong others.

More zoo posts to come!

Guest Blogger: Herald the Dog

Hello Blog-fans,
My name is Herald, and I'm a dog. Not just any dog--I'm a famous zoo dog. Over a year ago I started working with the kind keepers at the Wild Wonders Outdoor Theater in Tacoma, Washington who hired me to help them with their program.

So far, I've been doing a great job; the zookeepers are really learning a lot. I spend my days training the them to make funny noises, to feed me peanut butter and string cheese, and to act as the cast and crew for my live animals program.

This show is a BIG deal. At least five well-trained humans need to be present or I won't even attempt it, which is why we only do the whole program in the busy season here at the zoo.




During the program I go rafting,

and I take a hot air balloon ride.

Oh, and there are some other animals in the show, too, just to entertain the fans during my costume changes.

Check out the latest behavior I've taught the keepers here. These humans are pretty amazing, aren't they?

At night I send the trainers home to recuperate for the next day's sessions while I keep an eye on the Wild Wonders building and all of the other animals. I don't think it's an exaggeration to say a lot of them are bird-brained, and they really need looking after. Plus, there's that sneaky lynx who lives down the hall...I know he's up to something...

Life wasn't always all warm laps and Snausages though. I don't like to elaborate on my experiences before Wild Wonders, but I spent some long nights on the streets, on the run from the dog-catchers, begging for kibble. That's right: I'm a pound puppy. I'm not ashamed about my lack of pedigree. Even in the hard times, I knew I was destined for greatness.

Here's the real heart of the matter, Blog-fans. Just think what might have become of me--ME, Herald the celebrated conservation hero and all-around Wonder Dog--if some wise humans hadn't picked me to bring into their lives. I won't get all mushy about it because I'm not that kind of dog. But if you're thinking of adding a new friend to your family, visit your local shelter or humane society.

Give mutts a chance.

Brownie Toolboxes: A Degree in Architecture Would Have Helped

Although roses and florets are attractive cake decorations, they don't exactly shout "manliness!" so for my brother-in-law's birthday I decided to attempt the decidedly more macho toolbox cake. I found numerous well-executed toolbox cakes online and I used these as inspiration, though my skills aren't advanced enough for most of the techniques.

My end results, a mini cake and a mini-er cake, looked like this:

Honestly, they're not great cakes. But they're a heckuva lot better than what I would have predicted in the middle of the decorating process.

I started by tracing the tools from a coloring page (supplied from a Latter Day Saints lesson plan about ancient and modern tools) using melting chocolate, with mixed results.

Clearly the sizing wasn't to scale, since no screwdriver and sledgehammer should be of equal length. The tape-measure looked like it should be keeping the sun out of a center-fielder's eyes, and the wrenches looked like lobsters. But some of the tools were cute, so I was not discouraged.

I baked a batch of gluten-free brownies.

Denser than the gluten-free cakes I normally make, the brownies SHOULD have been easier to cut into an exact rectangle. They were not. The disaster began. The brownies cracked in places I didn't want them to crack and stuck together in places I didn't want them to stick together.

While the lumps of brownie that did not in any way resemble toolboxes cooled, I made icing. Well...I made a substance akin to icing. I used a new  recipe and had to substitute butter for shortening, which was most certainly an error. Then the lack of a hand mixer made it impossible to really cream the butter, so it was too thin and didn't crust fast enough.

At this point, I stacked the blobs of brownies, secured them with icing in between and tried to shave off some of the edges to give them sharp corners, like boxes. I re-purposed some of the pieces that had been shaved off by smashing them into crevices that didn't belong there.

Less than inspiring.

The situation was not improved when I tried to color the icing. With a rudimentary knowledge of color-mixing, I assumed that if I put a little of my black icing coloring into some white icing, I would get gray. Contrary to any kindergarten curriculum, black and white mixed together made purple.

Combine the coloration with the uncooperative consistency of the icing and the uneven edging and you get something that does not even vaguely approximate a toolbox. The tiny cake I made from the extra bits, with dimensions of about 4x2x2, escaped the purple, but not the lumpy texture.

To remedy, or at least mediate, the purple icing, I brushed the whole cake with a special sugary powder called luster dust that has a shine, so it would look a little metallic. Then I drew a "straight" line all the way around in black.

Adding a handle, a lock and some plates on the corners suddenly turned the purple metal lump into something that was at least related to a toolbox.

The tiny yellow cake was similarly rescued.

Glue a few recognizable chocolate tools to the cake and voila!

It's a small lump of edible (really tasty, actually) brownies that loosely impersonates a toolbox!

The icing consistency, while terrible for covering a cake smoothly, more than suffieced for writing.

Add few more chocolate tools for the finishing touch.

To be fair to the cakes, they surprised me by suddenly morphing into toolboxes at the last minute, which was a relief. I'm trying to learn to reserve judgment/despair in the middle of the cake decorating process, since the cakes always seem to transform themselves into the intended object rather abruptly.

In the end I was happy to give the cakes to my wonderful brother-in-law, who deserved every bite.

Burke Museum and UW Seismology Lab

When my friend Alex said, "Wanna go on a field trip with my class?" I thought, "Like...as a chaperone?" But no, Alex's college geology class was taking a trip to visit the University of Washington's seismology lab as well as the nearby Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture, and guests were welcome. Always eager to participate in nerdy activities, I readily accepted the invitation.

We started our journey at the UW seismology lab, which looked a lot less like the international space station flight control room than I expected. Instead, all of the field trippers, amounting to about 20 students, wedged into the lab with only a tiny bit of breathing room.

The most advanced earthquake monitoring and recording equipment in the Northwest looks like this:

Even more interesting than (and approximately the same square footage as) the main lab was the seismology closet.

We visited the lab just a week before the 9.0 rocked Japan, so we weren't able to see any of those recordings, though they must have been absolutely incredible.

Alex and I unpacked ourselves from sardine-tin lab and walked across campus to our next stop, the Burke Museum.

Although the Burke is not an especially large museum, the use of space and quality of exhibits is exceptional. Alex's professor, who proved to be as knowledgeable about natural history as he is about geology, led us through the exhibits displaying dinosaur skeletons, fossils and other amazing prehistoric artifacts.

A sauropod femur is nearly as tall as I am and probably weighs more.

The replicas of dinosaur bones were so realistic that I couldn't tell which ones were genuine. Archeopteryx, an avian ancestor is called "Urvogel" in German, which is a combination of the word for "bird" and the prefix used for "first" or "great," as in "great-grandmother." This is the great-grandmother bird's fossilized remains:

You can see the elements that make this species a transition between reptiles and their flighted relations.

A mastodon skeleton loomed over an entire narrow room, so much so that I couldn't frame it properly for a photo.

Did you know that when breaking ground for Seatac airport, construction workers stumbled upon the fossilized skeleton of a giant ground sloth? Did you even know such a thing as giant ground sloths used to exist?

In life they probably looked more like this:

And the Tyco toy company, with which many children of the 1980s are familiar, would have us believe that neanderthals used giant sloths as mounts for riding and shooting each other with turret-mounted lasers, rather like this. Slowest blitzkrieg ever.

We also learned about an archeological site in eastern Washington where the ancestor of what we know today as rhinos got caught in a lava flow that essentially acted as a flash-flood fossilization. The body burned up but the lava hardened into a rhino-shaped hole around it.

You probably aren't supposed to recline in the hole, but rather inspect it scientifically. Oh well.

The final skeleton we viewed, the Terror Bird, was displayed with accompanying drawings that (I quote Alex here) "made him look more like a terror chicken." Some of these birds stood over 10 feet and weighed in at about 400 pounds.

The lower floor of the Burke Museum also houses a collection of art from native peoples from around the world, so we perused the spectacular masks and totem poles, even though they were not even tangentially related to geology.

The museum, located just off of NE 45th on the UW campus, is open to the public daily from 10am to 5pm. For up-to-date information about visiting the museum, check out the Burke Blog here.

Oh, Canada!

Lion fish, tiger sharks, and bears, oh my! This weekend my dad's sweetheart, Mimi, and I took some girls' time in Vancouver, BC. Although I only live about 3 hours away, I'd never been to this international hub and I had been toying with the idea of driving up to visit the state-of-the-art aquarium there alone. As it turned out, Mimi is quite familiar with the city and was a willing travel companion, so we threw a couple of bags into her Subaru Forester and headed north.

Once inside the city, our first stop was at Pekoe Tea, a small shop where you can buy a variety of loose teas, specially blended and then dubbed fanciful names like Jasmine Dragon Pearl, Caramel Cup, Festivus, and Shitty Weather.

The best part is that a large rack of tins, each with a different tea blend, is available for your sniffing pleasure. That way, you don't get all the way home and into your first kettle before discovering you aren't as into Tiramisu Tea as you thought you'd be. You can also just order a little pot of tea, plus a cookie or scone and sit in the cafe portion of the shop.

Next we navigated the tiny parking garage of the Robsonstrasse Hotel (no idea why the name of the hotel is German--no other traces of Deutschland in the whole place) and checked in. This lamp was the only notable thing about the hotel room:

As soon as we could, Mimi and I hit the streets to get in some quality tourism time before dinner. We stopped at a bookstore and a candy store, saw the Vancouver art gallery and were handed some free limes, courtesy of Corona. Check out the critters made from caramel apples on the top shelf:

And why have I not already invented the combination of gummy bears, caramel and apple?

We also stopped for coffee and salad at a cafe that turned out to be trendy, with chic wall art.

After a lot more walking, a remarkable number of shoe stores, and many more shops, our stomachs urged us to find a restaurant. Always wanting to made the more informed choice, I made us wander the city for about 20 minutes before returning to the first place we'd looked at. Chau Kitchen, a Vietnamese restaurant decorated in sleek red and black, served us some excellent pho, fried spring rolls and a steamy rice dish. The waitress, however, was less than helpful about the presence of glutenous ingredients in the dishes; fortunately I love pho, and it's gluten free!

I slept quite soundly at the Robsonstrasse after staying out late chatting at Chau. We woke up early to embark on our Vancouver Aquarium excursion, and asked the oddly uninformed receptionist how to get there. Most of the questions we posed to the front desk staff at the Robsonstrasse Hotel went unanswered.

A chill hovered in the air and the overcast sky didn't bode well for our plans, but Stanley Park is beautiful, even when your teeth are chattering.

Helpful signs directed us through the park to the aquarium, where we found we weren't the only ones who decided to visit the premiere Northwest aquarium that day. If you think my photography skills have been dismal up until this point, you'll be sorry to know they didn't improve in time to get any good shots at the aquarium, so even though the while place was engaging, educational and visually appealing, my photos are not. Here are the best of them:

Dreamy moon jellies:

A sealion at a feeding we were lucky enough to get front-row seats to:

The children's area of the aquarium was adorable, complete with a pretend seal rescue station.

We watched a beluga whale presentation from an underwater viewing area.

A temporary Amazon exhibit that rivaled any permanent Amazon display I've seen had been constructed in the aquarium's lower level.

Scarlet ibis are always stunning.

Hyacinth macaws are the largest species of parrot in the world.

This tiny tucanet put on a show by taking a bath in a water fall.

A two-toed sloth hanging out with an ibis.

This frog is channeling Buddha.

Once we'd seen every animal there was to see in the aquarium, we went back into Stanley Park, and were pleased to see the sun breaking through.

Before enjoying a lunch of leftover Vietnamese food in our hotel room, Mimi and I stopped by the site of the Olympic torch.

Nearby an artist had erected a giant pixelated orca whale, representing how things need to be digitalized to get people's attention. He reminded me of legos.

Mimi is a Native American art enthusiast to an extent rivaled only by my dad. Both of them are extremely knowledgeable about the various mediums, styles, and artists, so much so that I feel certain they will be receiving offers from museums hoping to buy their collections soon. Vancouver is home to a number of Native American art galleries, thanks to its proximity to First Nation peoples. So of course, we visited a couple galleries where I was entranced by the art, though somehow it felt voyeuristic to photograph the pieces.

As evening descended, I once again made us wander the city too long trying to decide where to eat, but finally we chose Fogg N' Suds, a restaurant and bar based on the theme "Around the World in 80 Days." Though I could not sample the much-touted beer selection, I did have a fruity martini and a fresh spinach and goat cheese salad with dried cranberries and walnuts. Not only was the food excellent, but the atmosphere was pleasant, the view of the street was entertaining and the waitstaff were friendly and helpful. We ate well, returned to the hotel and slept well.

Sunday morning we packed up, checked out of the Robsonstrasse Hotel and drove to Granville Island, the venue for Vancouver's public market and independent shopping district. The market reminded me of Seattle's Pike Place Market, on a smaller scale, with vendors selling everything from New York sausage to fresh flowers to knitted baby hats with bear ears.

Our last stop before making the trek back to Seattle was the Lattimer Gallery, an inviting little gallery with a genial young man well-versed in First Nation art standing behind the display cases.

I hope to visit this lively, welcoming city again soon!

Bye, Vancouver!