Woodland Park Zoo Blog

Posted by: Susan Parke, Education This summer Woodland Park Zoo is promoting four different actions that we can all take to slow climate change through our food choices. One of these actions is to eat locally grown, seasonal produce, which has a lower overall carbon footprint than eating higher up on the food chain or sourcing food from far away. To do my part, I decided to join a CSA this summer—a Community Sponsored Agriculture program, just about the easiest way to get local produce from the farm straight to your dinner table. Every week I get an email reminder from the CSA to select eight items of locally grown produce that will be included in my box. So far, as I expected, there have been mostly greens, both salad and braising, but there have also been vegetables and grains as well. My first week I selected baby fennel, spring onions, turnips, yellow potatoes, a couple of different kinds of salad greens (including arugula – yum!), braising greens and eggs. Eggs fresh from the far...

Posted by: Jim Bennett, Marketing His ultimate vision is to construct a semi-closed system aquaponic operation behind the zoo’s Rain Forest Food Pavilion, raising trout and cycling the waste to grow herbs and salad greens. The herbs would be used in Lancer Catering’s food service operations; the trout as treats for the zoo’s penguins. And no packaging or shipping would be needed to get the food to market. Far fetched? I talked to executive chef Brandon Bretz and general manager Maureen Gulley of Lancer Catering, Woodland Park Zoo’s food concession partner, about how they help the zoo source food locally to minimize their carbon footprint . While aquaponics is an amazing vision worth exploring for the future, what Lancer does right now is remarkable in its own right. Fish served at the zoo’s Pacific Blue Chowder House is sourced locally from Ballard Seafood using updated guidelines from Seafood Watch . Produce is also brought in from local growers via Charlie’s Produce. Bretz doesn’t j...

Posted by: Andrea Barber, Education If you plan on coming to the zoo this summer, you may see me pushing a cart filled with a colorful array of plastic fruits and vegetables. The cart is taken on a journey nearly every day this summer to different locations around the zoo. This special cart is our Animal Farmer’s Market, the scene for the summer education program, “Shop like an Animal.” Grab a basket and one of our summer program presenters will show you how to shop. There are 5 different animals from the zoo that you can shop for: a tiger, gorilla, meerkat, brown bear or giraffe. Each animal has different dietary needs in order to be healthy, and a shopping list shows you the quantity and types of food these animals really eat in one day. Depending on the animal you pick, you are assigned a budget with a certain amount of “Carbon Bucks” with which to shop. There are a variety of fruits, vegetables, meats and treats in our Animal Farmer’s Market. Each food is assigned a Carbon Buck am...

Posted by: Kathryn Owen, Education When it comes to enjoying fresh fruits and vegetables, what could be better than being able to pluck a ripe tomato or crisp head of lettuce out of your very own garden? For Woodland Park Zoo’s gorilla troops , fresh-off-the-vine produce is just that accessible. In the winter they may be dining on evergreen elaeagnus leaves, and in the summer they may be stuffing themselves with grape leaves and tender vines. A wide variety of animals at the zoo enjoy fresh produce from the zoo’s browse program, which provides fresh leaves, stems and flowers for gorillas, red pandas, colobus monkeys, orangutans, elephants, tree kangaroos and many others. You and I use the term “browse” to mean sampling and exploring—like browsing the shelves of a bookstore in search of something appealing. But the term also refers to the plant materials eaten by browsers—that is, herbivores or plant-eaters that eat the leaves, stems and flowers right off the tree or bush instead of gra...

Posted by: Ric Brewer, Communications Did you ever wonder what it takes to provide food for the nearly 1,100 animals at Woodland Park Zoo? How does the zoo provide nutritionally balanced and natural diets that range from hundreds of pounds a day of hay for the elephants, oryx, gazelles and other animals to nettle leaf powder for our Partula snails? Where does it all come from? With nearly 300 different animal species, our staff works hard to provide all the animals with the opportunity to display natural behaviors, which includes replicating as closely as possible what they would eat in the wild. But there's even more to it than finding just the right veggies, fruits and other foods. When planning the diets for our animals, three factors are taken into consideration: 1) what is the best, nutritionally balanced diet for this particular species? 2) are those foods available? 3) can we find this food locally? What is the impact on our carbon footprint? Are we always able to make all...