Woodland Park Zoo Blog

Posted by: Kirsten Pisto, Communications Calling all junior conservation researchers! Junior Rangers check camera traps with Paso Pacifico in the Nicaraguan rain forest. Part of their data will help researchers to better understand carnivores such as jaguars and ocelots. Photo courtesy of Paso Pacifico. What is it like to be a conservation researcher in the field? A big part of studying the behavior of animals is being very patient and waiting a long time (sometimes hours, sometimes days!) for animals to make a move. Researchers chart the behaviors they observe to gather enough data for their scientific investigations. Field researchers use ethograms to document animal behavior. An ethogram is a chart which displays a list of possible behaviors as well as a timeline. Using an ethogram, researchers can quickly document the minute-by-minute actions and behaviors of an observation subject. Researchers also rely on sketching and drawing, or photography to supplement their note

Posted by: Kirsten Pisto, Communications This summer, we invited kids, ages 6 – 12, to submit their short stories about a Northwest animal encounter, fiction or non-fiction, to our MyZoo magazine Amazing Animal Encounters writing contest! Here are the winners! Our Grand Prize winner, Alice Yang, 11 years old: One morning, I was eating breakfast before leaving for my friend’s house to go to a birthday party. I was looking out our glass sliding door, next to the dinner table. It was a gloomy day; I wouldn't have been surprised if it rained.  There was a small patch of forest next to our house, but it was fenced off. I looked at the fence and saw something strange. There was a brown cat on it! It had been very still and I hadn't noticed it. The cat was in the neighbor's side of the fence, and I stared at it.   Suddenly it turned around and I saw its rather short tail. It suddenly dawned on me that it was much too large to be a regular house cat, and the short t

Posted by: Caileigh Robertson, Communications Photos by Ryan Hawk/Woodland Park Zoo With a combined diet of nearly 300 lb. of food per day, it’s a little surprising that our three female elephants produce about 900 lb. of waste daily! And what better is there to do with 900 lb. of poo than make paper? In the Banda Hut of the zoo’s African Village, visitors are transforming elephant dung into one-of-a-kind stationery. Beginning with the raw product of elephant poo, zoo staff steam-clean the fibrous poo balls at 160 degrees to eliminate all bacteria. Once cleaned, the poo greatly resembles hay. You see, although each elephant intakes 100 lb. of food daily, only about 40 percent of it is digested for energy. As for the rest, well, it comes back out the other end… The steamed poo is mixed with a gray, paper pulp, an important ingredient in poo paper-making created by mixing old, shredded zoo maps with water. The old maps are shredded, stripped and soaked in water to break down.

Posted by: Kirsten Pisto, Communications Photos by Kirsten Pisto/Woodland Park Zoo. Kids love bugs. There is just something irresistible about the creepy crawlies that slither, march and fly around us. Maybe it is their intriguing size or perhaps their alien form. Either way, I've seen a group of kids snub a jaguar for a trail of ants, seriously. We have plenty of bugs at the zoo, inside and out. Our Bug World exhibit is brimming with roaches, gigantic spiders and the coolest looking leaf insects you’ll ever see. We also happen to live in a region that is teeming with insects that can be found in our own backyards. Connecting kids to the insects in their backyard is a big part of connecting them to the idea of living landscapes . Every organism is a player, and if you start with the little guys, it is easy to get kids on board with that concept. We hung with Zoomazium interns Brianna Morley and Saritha Beauchamp as they led a group of youngsters and their parents to Zo

Posted by: Kirsten Pisto, Communications This spring, we asked kids to complete the picture in our Tiger Tails drawing contest to get us pumped for phase two of the Bamboo Forest Reserve. Thanks to all of the amazing young artists who entered the contest through our MyZoo magazine kids section. We received over 130 entries, some from as far away as Germany. It was a tough decision, but we had a lot of help – 25 staff from across the zoo assisted in judging. We considered detail, use of color, perspective, inspiration and creativity. We were all thrilled with your imagination and talent! Below are the grand prize champs and their artwork. Drumroll please, and the prizes are… Zoo Favorite Age 2-5 “Sneaky Tiger” Logan Myers, 4 Zoo Favorite Age 6-12 “Bamboo Bengal” Samantha Schallon, 11  Logan and Samantha will both receive a zoo tiger adoption and plush, 4 giraffe feeding tickets and their framed drawing. Most Inspiring “Tiger and Friends

Posted by: Monica Lake, Capital Projects Our sloth bears Randy and Tasha were out in full regalia Tuesday, sniffing, scratching, balancing on logs and slurping their favorite foods—all to greet 200+ zoo lovers and advocates who gathered to help us celebrate a major milestone:  breaking ground on the new Asian Tropical Forest exhibit complex! Assisted by sloth bear Randy, President and CEO Deborah Jensen spoke about design and animal care innovations at the Asian Tropical Forest groundbreaking ceremony Sept. 18, 2012. Photo by Ryan Hawk/Woodland Park Zoo. Nearly 100 additional zoo fans of the smaller variety “dug in” to make way for new homes for Asian small-clawed otters, sloth bears and Malayan tigers. Kids from Orca Children’s Center, North Seattle Fives Cooperative and West Woodland Elementary School joined the ceremony. Photo by Ryan Hawk/Woodland Park Zoo. The kids also did a great job of overseeing the work of several leaders of the Asian Tropical Fo

Posted by: Rob Goehrke, Education One of the goals of our ZooCrew education program for middle schoolers is to  connect youth to professionals  in the field in order to complement their classroom learning and pique their interest in various STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) careers. This summer, tablets generously donated by Washington STEM* helped us do just that. ZooCrew youth collaborate with zookeepers, giving them a positive exposure to careers in science. Photo by Jess Thomas . In August, ZooCrew partnered with a summer camp based in West Seattle, a good 30 minutes from Woodland Park Zoo. We were working on a project that connected the kids back to our animals on zoo grounds—developing enrichment devices to keep the animals stimulated and kickstart their natural instincts. A project like that needs lots of feedback from the zookeepers to make it work, but it would have been a big investment to ask zookeepers to drive out, stay for the program, and dri

Posted by Ric Brewer, Communications At the end of April, the kids at an Upper Eastside Manhattan first-grade class were treated to something special: a "virtual visit" via Skype with Woodland Park zoo penguin keeper, Celine Pardo . The class had been studying penguins and when they discovered that WPZ had won the Association of Zoos & Aquariums' Exhibit Award for our Humboldt penguin exhibit, they sought out to speak with us. After contacting us via email, their teacher Jen arranged the live interview. Celine, along with several penguin props, interacted via Skype with the kids. They had incredibly astute questions for her, gleaned through their studies. The first-graders ask everything from the details of penguin evolution to where are a penguin's ears. Both the kids and Celine had a great time. Here's the note their teacher emailed us immediately following the interview: Before the Skype interview, the kids used books, a few used the Internet, intervi