Woodland Park Zoo Blog

 Posted by Kirsten Pisto, Communications Royal ball python, Jeremy Dwyer-Lindgren | Woodland Park Zoo Lunar New Year ushers in 2025 with intelligence,  resilience  and renewal as we celebrate year of the snake! The symbol of the snake in the Chinese zodiac is known to represent charm, intuition and deep thinking. This year is also an Earth snake, which means 2025 could be a year for growth and creativity.    As snake enthusiasts, we also want to take this opportunity to celebrate snakes as the ecological powerhouses that they are. Snakes encourage biodiversity and are often ecosystem stabilizers as both predator and prey. There are more than 3,000 species of snake worldwide and around 150 species native to North America. At Woodland Park Zoo, we have a long history of caring for snakes and educating guests about their role in the ecosystem. We want you to get to know a few of our snakes—and hopefully you can channel their cool, chill, ectothermic vibes into 2025...

Posted by Elizabeth Bacher, Communications Photos: Jeremy Dwyer-Lindgren/Woodland Park Zoo Hello, Kaa! Snakes "smell" with their tongues, or more precisely use them to pick up scents in the air.  July 16 is World Snake Day, a day to appreciate these amazing and often misunderstood reptiles. All over the world, snakes play a vital role in maintaining balance in ecosystems—both as predators and as prey. Who better to serve as an ambassador for all of snake-dom than Kaa, our 19-year-old, male reticulated python. Our animal keepers estimate that Kaa is currently around 17 feet long and probably weighs between 125-135 pounds. Kaa—who is named after the Jungle Book character—arrived at Woodland Park Zoo 11 years ago and he currently lives in a habitat maintained just for him in the Trail of Vines area right next to our orangutan habitat. Reticulated pythons are native to southeast Asia and, when full grown, are among the longest snakes in the world—and they keep growing throughout ...

Posted by Kirsten Pisto, Communications In case you missed our keeper spotlight on  Instagram (@woodlandparkzoo)  last week, here’s an inside look at what it’s like to work with snakes, lizards and turtles as part of Woodland Park Zoo’s reptile and amphibian team. Hey everyone, we'd like to introduce you to Alyssa Borek, lead keeper on our reptile and amphibian team. Alyssa is a herpetologist—an expert in caring for our turtles, snakes, frogs and lizards. We're going to hand you over to Alyssa today for an up-close look at what it takes to care for these amazing creatures. Enjoy! Alyssa Borek with a flowerbox turtle. Photo by Peter Miller. Hi everyone, thanks for following me along today as I show you a few really cool parts of being a zookeeper and working with herps. In this photo, I am holding one of my favorite turtles here at Woodland Park Zoo!  This is one of our female flowerback box turtles, or as I refer to them, Cuora galbinifrons .  These...

Posted by: Kirsten Pisto, Communications It’s summer time! The season for lounging in the sand, soaking up the sun and shaking your rattler! Our beautiful female Aruba rattlesnake , Crotalus durissus unicolor, is doing just that at the Day Exhibit. An Aruba's sunset-colored coil. Photo by Kirsten Pisto/WPZ. These peach and rose colored rattlesnakes don’t just shake it for anybody though; this rare rattler is only found on one small Caribbean island, Aruba.  Because the species has such a small range, it is nearly extinct in the wild. The snakes are critically endangered primarily because of habitat loss as well as persecution, especially due to tourism and urban sprawl. These snakes live in vulnerable habitat in a tiny area. Fortunately, the government and people of Aruba understand the importance and value of their own special kind of rattlesnake, and have set aside a large portion of the interior of their island as protected habitat for this rattlesnake and other w...

Posted by: Kirsten Pisto, Communications Photos by: Kirsten Pisto/Woodland Park Zoo It's back to school these days, and even our baby eyelash palm pit viper is ready with school supplies. Here are seven tips for a successful school day, according to our pencil-loving snakeling. 1. Always bring your favorite pencil. This baby eyelash palm pit viper, born August 23, weighs about 0.1 ounces (2.9 grams). We brought a pencil to the photo shoot to help show scale, and that pencil quickly became the property of this little snake. 2. Protect your pencil at all costs. Eyelash palm pit vipers are ovoviviparous, which means they give birth to live young, instead of laying eggs. This snakeling is certainly a live wire! 3. Pay attention or you’ll get tangled in knots. Handling a baby eyelash palm pit viper is dangerous. They are venomous; do not play with snakes and pencils. Our keeper, Alyssa, was holding the pencil with a special tool for handling venomous snakes. 4...

Posted by: Gigi Allianic, Communications Thanks to the speedy efforts and smart diagnostics of hospitals in Canada and the U.S. and a poison control center, the life of a man bitten by a venomous viper was saved by antivenin supplied by Woodland Park Zoo. The life of Michael Lovatt of Roberts Creek, B.C. was saved thanks to the rescue of hospitals and Woodland Park Zoo. Photo courtesy of Vancouver Coastal Health. The 61-year-old Roberts Creek, B.C. man was bitten while vacationing in Costa Rica but didn’t know at the time it was a viper. On Monday when he returned to Vancouver, he immediately sought medical attention at Vancouver General Hospital where he was diagnosed with kidney failure, and suffering from bleeding and swelling from his foot to the mid-thigh.  Dr. Roy Purssell with the B.C. Centre for Disease Control (BCCDC) was brought in. Working around the clock, the medical team figured out the type of snake based on the patient’s symptoms, a Fer-de-lance Bothrops a...

Posted by: Peter S. Miller, Zookeeper “Is it safe to come out yet? Not yet, maybe tomorrow.” These are the thoughts that might arise in the brain of a Louisiana pine snake hatchling. It is a chance decision that could mean your life or death in the wild. Such is the beginning of life for an endangered Louisiana pine snake. Next thoughts: hide or eat. When your serpentine undulations would signal a nearby predator that a tasty meal has just emerged from a clutch of eggs under the soil, stealth is critical…but so is breakfast! As the old adage goes, “eat or be eaten.” The Louisiana pine snake, Pituophis ruthveni , is a species under threat from habitat alteration of its native longleaf pine forest in the southeastern United States. This species has just increased its numbers on planet Earth by two, thanks to hatchlings that emerged late this summer at Woodland Park Zoo’s Day Exhibit. This accomplishment might not sound like much, but when your species is rare in the wild and ...

Posted by: Rebecca Whitham, Communications UPDATE (5/23) - Nearly 400 people submitted name ideas and after narrowing it down to our top 5 choices, "Kaa" came out the winner with 44% of the vote! You can come meet "Kaa" (named for the Jungle Book character) in the Day Exhibit. We’ve got a big, new squeeze at the zoo—a 100-pound, 8-year-old male reticulated python now on view in the Day Exhibit. We need your help to name him! We’re collecting your name suggestions via our Facebook page through May 13, noon PST (complete instructions on our Facebook page). Zookeepers will select their five favorite names from the submissions and fans will then vote on May 17 on the zoo’s Facebook page for their top pick. The reticulated python is the longest snake in the world, with some rare specimens exceeding 30 feet in length and weighing 300 pounds, though its average size is 10 to 20 feet in length. As a constrictor, the python is not venomous but kills its prey by wr...

The Louisiana Pine Snake Species Survival Plan is one of more than 30 field conservation projects in 50 countries around the world supported by Woodland Park Zoo. Here is an update from the field by one of the conservationists working to return Louisiana pine snakes to the wild… Posted by: Steve Reichling PhD, Memphis Zoo Curator and Woodland Park Zoo conservation partner Repatriating the Louisiana pine snake to the eastern portion of its historic range, 50 years after its extirpation, progressed further this August with the release of three more hatchlings. These are especially important snakes because they are carrying externally attached radio transmitters which will allow us to keep tabs on them, at least for a short while, and thereby learn a little about how they are adapting to their environment. Early in the morning, I met staff biologists and rangers who work in the Catahoula District of Kisatchie National Forest, which is where our reintroduction is taking place. The potentia...