Woodland Park Zoo Blog

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: Rebecca Whitham, Communications Even dragons start out small. Have you seen the two Komodo dragon juveniles now living at the Adaptations Building at the zoo? Born in January at the Memphis Zoo as part of the Species Survival Plan for this endangered species, the duo moved here this summer to be raised in our ample dragon digs. Hard to imagine these tiny critters, who each weigh in at about one-and-a-half pounds (650 grams), will one day be as big as our 15-year-old male Selat, who is 110 pounds (50 kilograms). Though, they won’t reach adult size until they're about 7 to 10 years old! Once these dragons mature, they’ll continue to participate in the Species Survival Plan and may move on to other zoos if they are matched up with a partner for breeding. It’ll be some time before they are ready for that next step. For now, the juveniles are on view next door to Selat. We've built a little apartment for them inside one of the Komodo dragon exhibits th

This Elephant Appreciation Day, we check in with Woodland Park Zoo Partner for Wildlife , the Tarangire Elephant Project  on news from the conservation frontlines. Here they report in from the field on their growing involvement in elephant territories beyond the borders of Tarangire National Park: In the past year we have become more involved in new territory: the Makame Wildlife Management Area (WMA), to the southeast of Tarangire National Park. This is a vast area, nearly 1.2 million acres in size (almost two times larger than Tarangire National Park), which is arid, hot, and sparsely populated. Wildlife Management Areas are community lands that have been set aside for wildlife conservation and tourism, in order to encourage communities to promote conservation and benefit from the natural resources on their land. Makame is of particular interest to us because it harbors an elephant population that migrates to Tarangire National Park in the dry season. However, unlike the other el

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 Kristin Folger shows off her color study skills in front of her very colorful muses. Welcome to one of the best locations to practice sketching and drawing animals. Whether you are a novice or a practiced artist, Woodland Park Zoo offers hundreds of opportunities to polish your skills. Ready to get started? Download our free Woodland Park Zoo mobile app (for iOS and Android), visit the Maps tab, then tap on Tours to find the Sketching Animals GPS-guided zoo tour. On the tour, you’ll be prompted to work on a few different facets of sketching throughout the zoo. You may choose to spend a couple minutes on each prompt or spread the tour out over a few days if you like. With so many muses, you are bound to leave with some beautiful artwork as well as a deeper connection with your subjects. The tour explores 5 different phases of sketching including: gestural drawing, details, landscape elements, mark-making and color. Follow the pr

Posted by: Kirsten Pisto, Communications When we say the Partula snail is tiny, we really mean it. Photo by Emily Schumacher/WPZ. If you’ve been to Bug World lately, you may have noticed a very cool addition across the path! Our tiny Tahitian Partula snails have a teensy, new lab! Look for the conservation lab in the Temperate Forest zone of the zoo. Photo by Kirsten Pisto/WPZ. The rout of tiny endangered tree snails has moved out of Bug World and across the path to their brand new lab. The snail lab was completed this summer, and all of the residents seem quite at home in their new digs. You can see animal care and conservation at work when you visit the lab. Photo by Kirsten Pisto/WPZ. Erin Sullivan, collection manager, tells us a little more about the new lab. Why do the snails need their own space? The Partula snails living at Woodland Park Zoo’s lab are very special—they are extinct in the wild. Our zoo is one of the zoo’s participating in the captive bree

Posted by: Rebecca Whitham, Communications Looks like our baby giraffe spotted the web cam in his barn. His curious licks were caught in extreme close up on the cam—check out that tongue! Video: Baby giraffe webcam taste-a-thon The cam was always safely secured, but it sure did take a licking! The camera sits securely inside a cutout in the wall just below the giraffe feeder. Photo by Ryan Hawk/Woodland Park Zoo. Some of our dedicated giraffe cam viewers even caught him in the act while watching live: We'd love to know what you see when you tune into the giraffe baby cam . Send your best screenshots and observations to webkeeper@zoo.org , tweet or Instagram to @woodlandparkzoo (#giraffecam), or post to our Facebook timeline .  And of course, don't miss the chance to see the calf in person! He has access to the outdoor area of the giraffe barn daily, and tends to head out there mid-mornings through afternoons. We know the next big piece of news you