Brian’s Birthday

For Brian’s birthday, we went on 3 Behind-The-Scenes tours at the Zoo.  It was a long day, but very cool.  The first was of the recently-renovated Aquarium.  During the Aquarium renovation, the shell of the building was kept, but the inside was completely gutted.  When they built the Aquarium originally, the water was held in a couple of huge storage tanks, the weight of which was not adequately supported, and the water flowed between exhibits, which is not ideal with regards to quarantining disease.  The guts of a modern aquarium are pretty complicated-looking:

Here’s a quarantine tank:

It’s all worth it though:

We got to feed the fishies in the huge tank:

(This tank, different view:)

After the Aquarium tour, we had a tour of the Reptile House.  The Reptile House is probably the building that remains the closest to its roots…The only things that are markedly different are that the pit in the middle of the main part of the building, which I believe housed turtles when I was small, has been filled in, and the addition of Baru the Saltwater Crocodile.  We started with a tour of the main part of the building, which amounted to walking around much of the outer loop of the exhibits, where the keepers have access to each exhibit.  A keeper talked to us about their interactions with the AZA, how they have to practice with venom/dangerous animal drills, etc.  She introduced us to this little Galapy, who we saw poop and pee:

Another keeper took us behind the scenes of Baru’s area and talked about the care of Baru, and then we got to go meet this guy, Emerson the Galapy:

We got to pet him and he was like a big, slow dog…very curious and cute.  We got yelled at by a random Zoo-goer because he thought we were going rogue in entering Emerson’s enclosure.

THEN, we had our Penguin/Cassowary tour.  First we met the Penguin keepers in the new Penguin building.  We were excited to learn that there were 2 secret Penguin babies.  By the time we saw them, they were mostly full grown.  We recently learned that the girl babby was briefly on exhibit but is now on her way to another zoo, and the boy babby’s leg defect (which they told us they could take care of with a boot made of scuba suit) worsened, and he didn’t make it.  I took this picture of the girl baby, right before they told me not to take pictures or publish them online.  I’m not sure why these two babies were such a secret, other than maybe they knew the boy wasn’t going to make it, because just lately they’ve been heavily publicizing a subsequent set of babies.

We were supposed to get to feed the cassowaries fruit, but the normal cassowary keeper wasn’t there, and the guy who filled in stress-fed the cassowaries all the fruit.  (And/or some sort of bird flu concern):