Small mammals

Today, I got my wish to work on a different section of the zoo so that I could show you some of the other animals when I was put on the small mammal section for the first time.

I started the day by visitng the coati enclosure to carry out a quick clean and to give them fresh food and water. Two of them were still in bed, but the other was more than happy to wander around and find out what was going on. Here are a couple of spots I managed to take:

After the coatis, Ricky and quickly cleaned out the corsac foxes and then it was over to the meerkats. There are actually two families of meerkats at the park in different enclosures and are a very popular attraction. There were about four different sets of people on the meet the meerkat experience today alone.

Now my Nova Scotia friends will remember my excitement of racoons. Today I got close to them, but unfortunately I wasn't able to go into the enclosure with them. Apparently the females are being aggressive at the moment so I had to make do with cleaning their indoor enclosure and look at them throught the cage bars... Next time.

I had a fantastically enjoyable morning which was topped off by getting the opportunity to hand feed one of the red pandas. They are really beautiful. Here's a picture of one of them which I took a few weeks ago:

The rest of the day was spent preparing the animals feeds for next time (cutting up large amounts of vegetables and other ingredients - no cat food for these meerkats), doing general cleaning and sweeping around the zoo (because of all the meet the meerkat experiences that Matt had to do we didn't get to do the thinks we'd hoped).

My last chore of the day was to help out the people working on the bird section by getting rid of some stinging nettles that had been growing down the side of one of the enclosures. It was a really tight gap which required you to stand sideways (and step over metal bars). However the real challenge came from the scarlet macaw occupying the adjacent cage who insisted on following me around the cage. This is a picture taken with no zoom at all which hopefully will give you some idea of just how close this parrot was! I was quite nervous of her.

A final piece of good news before I sign off for the day is that one of the penguin eggs hatched out on Tuesday. I was shown a photo and it is really cute. In three to four weeks it will hopefully come out of it's nest so that the public can see it; though I'm hoping to have that honour next week...