Woodland Park Zoo Blog

Posted by: Rebecca Whitham, Communications Keepers train our tigers and sloth bears behind the scenes to get them to cooperate with their daily care. But in our new exhibits , we’re bringing the behind the scenes front and center with special training areas in the exhibit. You’ll get to watch keepers interact with the animals up close as they train right in front of you! Training is an essential part of providing excellent care for these intelligent, powerful animals. It's a lot easier to give medicine to or examine a body part of a massive tiger when it is cooperating! When you Give Ten for Tigers , you help us bring this and other cool features to the zoo! Thank you.

Posted by: Rebecca Whitham, Communications We reveal a secret of zoo exhibit design in this latest video.  Help us make our design plans for a new exhibit for tigers and sloth bears a reality through our Give Ten for Tigers campaign . We're 25% to our fundraising goal and we're hoping to raise another $75,000 before May 25 in order to raise enough funds to begin on construction for Phase One of this major new exhibit project. We've been asking you to give, but we're also prepared to give back. Anyone who makes a gift is automatically entered into our Give Ten, Win Ten giveaway for a chance to win a prize pack of 10 zoo admission passes and a tiger ZooParent adoption. You can also enter to win here .  Thanks for your continued support!

Posted by: Rebecca Whitham, Communications Can you guess which zoo animal these claws belong to?  We'll give you time to think. . . . . . . Did you get it?  . . . . . . Got it? It's the sloth bear! Those sharp, 3-inch-long claws belong to the sloth bear and they are used to dig out insect mounds. After digging, sloth bears  blow away the dirt with their long, mobile lips and with a huge breath, suck up the termites like a high-powered vacuum. You’ll see these adaptations up close when we transform our sloth bears’ and tigers’ 60-year-old exhibits into state-of-the-art, naturalistic homes coming in 2014.  Help us get started on the transformation : Give Ten for Tigers today at http://bit.ly/GiveTen Thanks! (Photos by Ryan Hawk/Woodland Park Zoo.)

Posted by: Rebecca Whitham, Communications Can you spot the joey? Our red-necked wallaby baby is spending more time poking out of its mother's pouch, even when mom is hopping all around the exhibit like in the photo above. The infant wallaby, known as a joey in the marsupial world, still spends much of its time curled up in 3-year-old mom Kiley's pouch. As the summer progresses, it'll begin venturing out more and more, returning to mom for feedings. This is the first wallaby joey at Woodland Park Zoo, part of our Species Survival Plan (SSP) efforts in conjunction with the Association of Zoos & Aquariums. Led by experts in husbandry, nutrition, veterinary care, behavior, conservation and genetics, AZA-accredited institutions manage each species as one population in North America to maximize genetic diversity, with the goal of ensuring the long-term survival of the population and the health of individual animals. SSPs also involve a variety of ot

Posted by: Rebecca Whitham, Communications Stretch with us! Archive image of Hadiah, the last Sumatran tiger cub born at Woodland Park Zoo, seen here in 2006 at 16 days old. We'll have a breeding pair of Malayan tigers in our new exhibit, which means we may have more cubs in the near future! Photo by Ryan Hawk/Woodland Park Zoo. It’s GiveBIG day in King County, which means your $10 gift to our Give Ten for Tigers campaign will get stretched by the partial matching funds from the Seattle Foundation today only when you make your gift at this link .   Even if you can’t make a gift, click the share buttons to spread this to your friends and help us get the word out across the community. Together, we’ll create an awesome new exhibit for tigers and sloth bears at the zoo.  Remember, GiveBIG is today only. Any gift you make through GiveBIG will go directly to our Give Ten for Tigers campaign. Tomorrow we'll return to our regularly scheduled programming of Give

Posted by: Rebecca Whitham, Communications Early in the morning, the tropical rain forest usually resonates with "singing" siamangs whose call is so loud it can be heard for up to 3 miles.  How can they project so far? That hairless throat pouch blows up to act as a resonator that enhances the carrying of their call. Photo by Dennis Conner/Woodland Park Zoo.

Posted by: Rebecca Whitham, Communications We’re just a little over a week away from officially debuting two species of wild pig at the zoo on May 5 and 6 — Visayan warty pigs and African warthogs . Warthogs have moved into the zoo's African Savanna biome.  When new animals arrive at the zoo, they go through a standard 30-day quarantine. Our newly arrived 1-year-old brother and sister warthogs—who came to us from Zoo Atlanta—are wrapping up their quarantine now and have just been introduced to their exhibit space so they can begin to acclimate to their new surroundings. But a big step for them before they could enter their exhibit space in the African Savanna was to head off to the vets for a health check-up in order to be cleared from quarantine. Female warthog gets her check-up by our Animal Health team. The warthogs recently completed their quarantine exams and got clean bills of health. The two were weighed, had x-rays taken and blood drawn,

Posted by: Rebecca Whitham, Communications 4/27 UPDATE: If you are having trouble getting www.zoo.org to load, you can buy your tickets directly at this link .  BECU ZooTunes presented by Carter Subaru returns for its 29th season and another exciting line-up! The popular concerts are held outdoors on the vast, picturesque North Meadow of Woodland Park Zoo. The new season kicks off June 27:  June 27 - Leo Kottke / Jake Shimabukuro ($24)  July 3 - k.d. lang and the Siss Boom Bang ($38)  July 18 - Grace Potter & The Nocturnals ($22)  July 19 - Ziggy Marley ($28)  Aug 1 - Los Lobos / Steve Earle and the Dukes ($28) Aug 5 - The Johnny Clegg Band / Ladysmith Black Mambazo ($28) Aug 12 - An Evening With Melissa Etheridge ($39.50) Aug 15 & 16 - An Evening With Pink Martini ($34)   Aug 22 - Trombone Shorty & Orleans Avenue / Robert Randolph & the Family Band ($26)  Aug 29 - Rosanne Cash / Madeleine Peyroux ($26) BECU ZooTunes presented by Carter Subaru

Posted by: Rebecca Whitham, Communications While many visitors think this animal is a goose that has taken up residence in the flamingo exhibit, this is in fact the Coscoroba swan , native to South America and known to fly with flamingos during migration in the wild. Photo by flickr user Sean Enright

Posted by: Rebecca Whitham, Communications Although their name literally means "thousand-legged," most millipedes have no more than 300 legs. Millipedes have two pairs of legs per body segment, and a mature millipede averages about 40-60 segments. Photo by Ryan Hawk/Woodland Park Zoo.

Posted by: Rebecca Whitham, Communications What’s better than one joey? Two joeys! No, not those Joeys. We’re talking baby marsupials! We’re excited to have had two little joeys born at our Australasia exhibit . Our 5-month-old, red-necked wallaby joey is just starting to peek out of its mother’s pouch, and our newborn wallaroo joey has not been seen yet but will start to emerge in June or July. Wallaby joey in its mother’s pouch. Photo by Dennis Dow/Woodland Park Zoo. This is especially exciting news for us as it marks the first wallaby joey born at Woodland Park Zoo, part of our work with the Association of Zoos & Aquariums’ collaborative Species Survival Plan breeding program. If you come by to look for the wallaby joey, you’ll want to have a bit of patience and a little luck on your side. You’ll be looking for the joey in the pouch of 3-year-old, first time mom Kiley. You can tell her apart by the orange tag on the front of her right ear. You can ide

Posted by: Rebecca Whitham, Communications Komodo dragons have an excellent sense of smell enhanced by a long, forked tongue that helps them detect carrion up to 6 miles away.   They also use their tongue to investigate other Komodo defecation sites. That might sound gross to us, but it provides valuable information to them about another's sex, size and age. Photo by Mat Hayward/Woodland Park Zoo.

Posted by: Rebecca Whitham, Communications Malayan tiger. Photo courtesy Fresno Chaffee Zoo. Serving on the exhibit design team for new Malayan tiger and sloth bear exhibits has been the highlight of my years at Woodland Park Zoo. Apologies in advance--you might see an extraordinary amount of exclamation points in this blog post because I am  so excited after all this time to unveil the cool features we’ve dreamed up for this new space! And with your support, we can make it a reality! An overview of the all new, 2-acre tiger and sloth bear exhibit complex. (Click to enlarge.) Artist rendering by Studio Hanson/Roberts. Our tigers and sloth bears currently live in 60-year-old exhibits, some of the last remaining old-school exhibits at the zoo. It’s time to transform this space into a state-of-the-art, naturalistic exhibit complex for these endangered species. We’re making it better for the animals, better for visitors, better for zoo staff and better for the environment

Posted by: Rebecca Whitham, Communications When the sunbittern unfolds its wings, a burst of color is revealed with a pattern that looks like two glaring eyes. The “eyes” can be used to frighten predators. Come see the sunbittern in the always warm Tropical Rain Forest building. It's the perfect escape on a rainy day. And now rainy days at the zoo might come with a little something extra--50% off zoo admission! With our new Rainy Day Discount , we'll activate a special coupon on select dreary days. Just visit our Rainy Day page to see if there's a coupon good for your next trip on a soggy day. Photo by Dennis Dow/Woodland Park Zoo.

Posted by: Rebecca Whitham, Communications There are big changes coming soon to our tiger and Asian bear exhibits as we get ready to make over the 60-year-old spaces into naturalistic, state-of-the-art homes for these animals. Next week we’ll unveil our final design plans for the new space. But before we get caught up in what’s to come, we want to tell you about some related changes underway—saying goodbye to sun bears at Woodland Park Zoo. As we started to gather ideas for the new exhibits that will replace this outdated part of the zoo, we had to get serious about planning for space. You see, we are seeking to deepen our commitment to and involvement in the Association of Zoos & Aquariums Species Survival Plan captive breeding programs for Asian bears. To become a center for endangered Asian bear breeding, we need to use exhibit space more efficiently to allow for multiple generations of bears—from newborns to the elderly—and account for the need to separate bears that