Woodland Park Zoo Blog

Posted by: Rebecca Whitham, Communications This week marks Woodland Park Zoo’s 111th birthday, and what a 111th year it has been! In 2010 we celebrated conservation successes, won a national best exhibit award, hatched endangered species and so much more. Here’s my personal pick of the top 10 zoo stories of 2010, in no particular order. What were your favorite zoo experiences this year? 1. Endangered penguin chicks hatch in new exhibit 2. Snow leopard cologne sniff test helps conservation research in the wild 3. Rescued golden eagle finds new home at zoo 4. Meerkats return to the zoo after 10-year absence—and they’re meerkute! 5. Elephant Chai predicts winner of the Apple Cup 6. Zoo wins national Best Exhibit Award for sustainably-built Humboldt penguin exhibit 7. Teens raise and release endangered turtles into wild 8. Community celebrates endangered species with zoo’s Limited Edition art and Trophy Cupcakes 9. Zoo blog readers help raise money to fight ...

Posted by: Rebecca Whitham, Communications This week, we released the first of six prints for our Limited Edition campaign , this one highlighting the endangered African wild dog . With only 3,000 African wild dogs left in the wild, this is a species on the edge, surviving in scattered packs across sub-Saharan Africa, a result of habitat loss and fragmentation. What isn’t fragmented is this species way of life in the pack—their social structure is remarkable. Even the scene at a kill for these carnivores is polite and orderly, with pups eating first while the adults fend off scavengers. How do they keep the peace? They frequently use ritualized gestures of appeasement to prevent any serious infighting. Most appeasement behavior is ritualized food-begging, but other gestures are familiar to anyone who owns a pet dog, such as whining, tail-wagging, and rolling over to expose the belly. You can see some of their hunting instincts at work if you ever catch our African wild dogs enjoying a...

Posted by: Dr. Deborah Jensen, President and CEO Animals shouldn’t come in limited edition, yet dwindling wild populations have one fifth of the world’s vertebrates teetering on the edge of extinction. This fall, we launched our Limited Edition art campaign to draw attention to the plight of endangered species, what we’re doing to conserve them, and how you can help. The campaign started with billboards around town showing artist renditions of six of the endangered species Woodland Park Zoo is working to save: Panamanian golden frog ; western pond turtle ; African wild dog ; Sumatran tiger ; golden lion tamarin ; and red crowned crane . The six works of art, shown above, were designed by prominent Pacific Northwest artists Troy Gua, Natalie Oswald, Fumi Watanabe, Don Clark, Fiona McGuigan and Jesse LeDoux. The numbers scribbled in the left-hand corner of the billboards—evocative of limited edition artwork—represent the number of individuals of that species remaining in the wild: 1,10...