Nancy and the farmyard

This week and last week I was working on the farmyard section of the zoo. I have a bit of a love hate relationship with this section. I love the pigs, and enjoy cleaning out their enclosures and the small animal cages – the chinchilla, mice and rats etc; but I simply can not build up any enthusiasm for cleaning out the rabbits.

I think it would be fine if there were only 4 or 5 rabbit runs to clean out, but there are 13 of them and it’s one of those jobs which simply seem to take forever!

I don’t really have much in the way of farm news with which to entertain you. Here is a picture of one of the goats which I took on Sunday. He/She definitely seems to be the boss of them all!

One of my favourite animals at the zoo is Nancy the pig and I thought today I would spare a section of my blog just for her. Nancy shares an enclosure with her sister Harriet and I try and go to see them every week and take them some carrot (normally I pinch a bit from the feed pot if I have to prepare it, or give them some of the food which has fallen the wrong side of the enclosure. Because of this they both tend to come straight over to me, if not, Nancy always comes when I call her.

This week I thought I’d try and take a nicer photo of her and she decided that because I was ignoring and not feeding her or giving her a scratch behind the ears, that she’d put her feet up on the wall in an attempt to get to me. This is the photo I finally got of her up on the wall. She was less than impressed with the flash though but I quickly made it up to her with anothe rpiece of carrot!

Despite being a bit hectic, I enjoyed my day and also spent time helping to prepare some of the meerkat feeds. Unfortunately there seems to be a real lack of volunteers at the moment which means that some weeks there is no one working on some sections, which is a great shame. It also means less variation for me because the paddocks and farmyard sections are the ones which require the help the most.

For my final picture this week, I thought I would introduce you to another relatively new member of the zoo. This is Houdini, a baby Bactrian camel. I always look forward to saying hello to her every morning!