Woodland Park Zoo Blog

Posted by: Lucas Engles-Klann, 5-year-old animal lover With help from his parents and the support of Woodland Park Zoo, 5-year-old Lucas Engles-Klann, a WPZ member and budding conservationist, would like to invite you to his Third Annual Dine Out for Animals fundraiser… Hi all you zoo fans! Come to the Third Annual Dine Out for Animals which is happening Sunday, October 3rd from 2:00 p.m. - 7:00 p.m. We're going to have a great time at Elemental and Elemental Next Door in Wallingford, thanks to Laurie and Phred who are donating their space again. Last year, we raised $5,000 for gorilla animal care and habitats at Woodland Park Zoo. This year, Dine Out will benefit even more animals: the zoo's gorillas plus also the turtles in the Day Exhibit, the Northern Trail grizzly bears, and the wildlife impacted by the oil spill in the Gulf. Why do I organize Dine Out every year? Since I was two years old, I've been really passionate about wild animals and saving them. I learned the l

Posted by Ric Brewer, Communications For the fifth time in our history, Woodland Park Zoo has been honored with an Exhibit Achievement Award by the Association of Zoos & Aquariums (AZA) for our Humboldt penguin exhibit. The prestigious award, equivalent to an "Oscar" in the zoo and aquarium world, was presented this week at AZA's annual conference in Houston. In a rare move by AZA, the top award also went to a second institution, Oregon Zoo, for its Predators of the Serengeti. The achievement award is presented by AZA for outstanding dedication to conservation issues, construction of exhibit space and simulation of species natural habitats. The state-of-the-art penguin exhibit, opened in May 2009, transports zoo-visitors to the rocky coastal peninsula of Punta San Juan, home to the largest breeding population of Humboldt penguins in Peru. There are many factors used to determine "best exhibit" status, but the many energy-efficient and "green" elem

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