Woodland Park Zoo Blog

Posted by: Ric Brewer, Communications The newest species to join our Tropical Rain Forest dome, the bananaquit , is not rare in the wild, but this oddly named bird is certainly unique due to the fact that many scientists still disagree about exactly which taxonomic group it belongs. The bananaquit ( Coereba flaveola ) is a species of passerine bird (the order of birds which contains nearly half of all bird species ranging from warblers to crows and sparrows). It features a brilliant bright yellow breast with a dark gray-to-black top and horizontal white stripes above and below its dark eye. Its beak is slightly curved and awl-like. It is tentatively placed in the tanager family, but classified as incertae sedis by other authorities (such as the American Ornithologists' Union) as its affinity to other species is uncertain. This fancy Latin term basically means, "We don't know for sure." While its classification is debated , it is often placed in its own family, Co

Posted by: Cathy Macchio, Grizzly Bear Outreach Project , a Woodland Park Zoo Partner for Wildlife Recently I met Maggie B., who lives in Wisteria Park. For several weeks, she had a bear in her yard. Maggie and her husband, as well as a few other neighbors, do appropriately store their garbage in garages until the morning of pick-up to deter bears. Unfortunately, many of her neighbors do not follow the same Bear Smart practices, which is why the bears continue to visit the neighborhood and her backyard. The bears were entering the Wisteria neighborhood through Maggie’s yard, as well as other neighbor’s yards. Once the bear smelled ripe garbage it wandered down the alley pulling out trash from garbage cans and brought the trash back into Maggie’s yard where it ripped open the bags to eat everything and anything it could find. Over a four-day period Maggie collected three large bags of other people’s garbage from her yard and the greenbelt area adjacent to her home because she was conc

Posted by: Jenny Mears, Education I’m straining my eyes and craning my neck while sitting in a small boat speeding around a bend in the Kinabatangan River in Borneo. “There! There!” someone shouts and points to the nearby bank. It’s then that I catch my first glimpse of an elephant in the wild, a Borneo pygmy elephant calmly grazing on grass by the river. Eventually, we turn the corner and are able to see the entire herd of approximately 45 elephants. Most of the adult elephants are also ripping up and eating the long grass; some juveniles are wrestling with each other in the river; a few of the babies are nursing. Meanwhile, I am awestruck and amazed, tears streaming down my face, unable to believe that I’m witnessing this incredible natural phenomenon first-hand. Summer 2010 found me embarking on a Field Expedition to Borneo, an island in Southeast Asia considered to be a hotspot of ecological diversity, as part of my Global Field Program Master’s degree through Ohio’s Miami Universi

Posted by: Christy Cheever, Development This summer at the zoo we are teaching guests about the environmental benefits of eating locally, and in an earlier blog post we talked about how we also try to feed our animals locally produced food as well. But where the food comes from is just one part of this sustainable story--we're also very involved in where it goes. As animals process their food, their bodies take in the vitamins and nourishment they need to live and thrive. The rest ends up as waste. And at the zoo, that’s the makings of some prized material… Zoo Doo . Zoo Doo is finished, dark and rich compost with some woody material remaining. Woodland Park Zoo creates nearly 1 million pounds of compost each year saving $60,000 per year in disposal costs. The zoo’s non-primate, herbivore animals’ manure is used for this process. This includes the elephants, hippos, zebras, giraffes, gazelles, and oryx among others. The Zoo Doo process begins when fresh manure and straw bedding are

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: Gretchen Albrecht, Zookeeper Woodland Park Zoo’s lush habitat often attracts local wildlife. For the first time, we’ve confirmed that wild Cooper’s hawks are nesting here on zoo grounds. Their nest has been spotted in the chestnut tree in the wallaroo exhibit in our Australasia biome. The pair has successfully fledged three young birds which are still heard around the zoo food begging from time to time. They are learning to hunt on their own at this point, but they still get an occasional meal from their parents. Both adults are second year birds meaning they both hatched in 2009. We can tell this by their plumage since they are currently molting from their immature plumage (which they keep for one year) into their adult plumage. Often the nests of younger, less experienced birds are not successful or they raise fewer young, so it has been fun to see this young couple do so well with their fledglings. To get a better understanding of the population of Cooper’s hawks in the a

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