the birds

I decided that since it's been a while since I've posted, I would post twice this evening (gasp!). The topic of this one will be about the birds (as the title suggests).

As an intern at the Zoo, I get the opportunity to shadow other jobs at the Zoo to get a mini taste of what it's like to do other things besides Education. So when it came time to pick, I was offered a list of departments which I could shadow. Northern Trail (Takins and tigers and moose, oh my), Tropics Trail (I could chill with the komodo for a day...), Behavior/Enrichment (working with a variety of animals), Marine Mammals (oooo dolphins...), and Bird Show (No way?! Bird Show I pick birdshow!). For those who are not familiar with this zoo, some of the things you can do in a visit are go to a dolphin show, a dive show, and/or the Bird Show. The Bird Show is my absolute favorite thing at the Zoo (besides Zoo Camp of course), so when the opportunity arose for me to spend an entire day with the Bird Show staff, I jumped on it.

So there I was, last Tuesday, arriving at work at seven in the morning to work with the birds. Now the Bird Show keeps tons of birds of a variety of shapes and sizes and purposes. There are hawks, owls, eagles, falcons, macaws, cockatoos, other varieties of parrots, a toucan, a crane, a vulture, pigeons, ducks, red jungle fowl, and I think that's it. They all live backstage of the amphitheater, and most are used for different things in the actual show. Now all of these birds need to be fed, have their cages cleaned, be weighed, etc. So most of the morning for the Bird show staff is spent cleaning and preparing the diets. And being an extra pair of hands, I was thrown right in to help. Let's just say bird poop is nothing compared to pig poop. So it was a cinch for me to clean out the crane enclosure and hose down the parrot rooms.

After that I got to help prepare the bird of prey diets. Now each bird has an individualized diet to make sure that they stay healthy and within their target weight. The diets use a variety of food in varying amounts depending on what they ate yesterday and the day before and last week. Therefore, a good portion in the morning is also spent preparing the specific diets for each bird. That day we were giving them rabbit and quail. Each type of food had to be cut up and divided between the birds. After watching Laurel do the rabbit and a quail, I was ready to give it a try. Now, unlike the chicken or turkey we buy at the store to eat, Zoo quail doesn't come all nicely prepared. It comes as a whole quail, feathers and all. And this is how you prepare it to be consumed by the raptors: Step 1: Cut off wings. Step 2: Cut off feet. Step 3: Defeather. Step 4: Cut open and gut. Step 5: Cut into appropriate chunks. For one who used to get queasy at the sight of the gizzards from a frozen Thanksgiving turkey, I thought I did pretty well getting quail guts all over me. You may be wondering (as I was) why go to all the trouble of gutting and defeathering if you're just feeding it to an owl or hawk. The answer is that it would be much more work to leave them on/in because the bird would, in process of eating, fling feathers and gizzards all over the place for the Keeper to clean up later. Good choice.

After all of the cleaning and stuff, it's time to get ready for the show. Whomever is the main presenter, gets to pick which birds will be in the show, what order they appear in, and which Keeper is responsible for releasing and catching the birds. This is all written on a board half an hour before the show. During that time, everyone runs around getting birds ready and memorizing what they have to do and when. Once the show begins, there is nothing but controlled chaos behind stage. The keepers are listening for vocal cues to know when to release a bird and others are running around with birds and it's insane. A really fun insane, but insane. I just sat in the corner taking it all in and marveling at the amazing coordination between all of the humans and all of the birds. Because once the birds are released onto stage they know just what to do. Sometimes it doesn't always work that way, but for the most part the bird does what it's supposed to and gets a treat for a reward. It's soooooo cool.

It was for sure an experience that I'll never forget, and would love to do again.