A day as a Zookeeper

When it begins..

Its 5:55am and my alarm has gone off to tell me to "get up or you will be late for work" and now that I have cut my alarm short by 30 minutes giving me extra time in bed, it means every minute is precious and one wrong move and I will be late to work. As soon as I am dressed and ready to go I run downstairs to clean out the bunnies hutch as they are currently living indoors until next spring and then I will either remove Spyros food bowl for a starve day or like today I will put her favourite blend of veggies in for her.

At 6:30am I leave for my 35 mile trip to the zoo and more than likely I will stop at the petrol station or a store to pick up essential snacks for lunch time break - I love twix's what can I say. I usually arrive at the zoo for about 7:20am and this gives me 10 minutes to just relax and think about the day ahead and try and plan what I want to achieve however, I can plan all I want it is guaranteed something will mess that up- today was no different.

After collecting my radio and keys I head down to my section which is the furthest point in the zoo so it means I walk past a lot of category A animals such as the stunning Amur Leopards who are one of my favourite big cats, the chimps who you can hear shouting and calling knowing keepers are around, then past the Meerkats who run over to the glass to see if you are coming to see them and finally past the African lions who the male usually spends his mornings calling out across the zoo and you can hear it EVERYWHERE and its exceptionally loud as our staff room is right by their exhibit.

First part of the day

As soon as I arrive to section I check the animals that are right near the staff room, the rats are currently occupying one of our large indoor aviaries whilst the tortoises have hijacked their exhibit for hibernation preparation. I then do a walk round our Rainbow Lorikeet exhibit and check all my birds are up and alive and looking well which today everyone was fabulous. After collecting all the bowls from the exhibit I then put them to soak because nectar seriously sicks solid to those bowls and then head round to see the Koi-carp fish and sadly today we had lost one of our schbunkins that live alongside them. It is never easy losing an animal, regardless if its a fish or a millipede it still feels the same, almost like you failed them. You sit there and question how they were the night before, could you have done something differently? what if I came in earlier would I have been able to save them? its a helpless feeling. This is something I personally struggle with, I can be a worrier specially when it comes to my animals so for the next 10 minutes I stood and observed them all feeding, swimming, took the temperatures of the pools and waited to make sure everyone was alright. Your probably thinking... they are just fish calm down, no they are my animals and they rely on us for food and water quality so I want to make sure they are all OK.

Once I have opened the building and cleaned all my bowls I then need to make the 49 loris breakfast which is 780g of powdered nectar to 4900ml water. Each bird should get 100ml of nectar a day so this is important. Also the food is split into 5 different jugs with 300ml is made into ice cubes for the evening meal. Once mixed and separated its time to feed those hungry ravenous birds and the quicker you do it the less chance your ear drums will burst - THEY ARE SO LOUD. I quickly put the bowls into the back aviary of their exhibit and I blow 3 times on a whistle to signify food is in! One by one they come in to which they are then locked in and counted and checked over before I spend the next 2 hours cleaning the exhibit. Cleaning comes in all forms from washing windows (tiger section have 200 windows to clean twice daily), scrubbing perches, cleaning plants, scrubbing the floor, emptying nest boxes, cleaning wired fences, cleaning the public wash stations, litter picking, putting the fake plants back on the wall they have decided to pull out the wall, sweeping, cleaning the waterfall, cleaning the plastic flaps that cover the doors; there is so much to do and so little time. At 10:15 its break time for 15 minutes and then the exhibit is open to the public being one of our most popular attractions.

Heres our baby birds eating together

11am

Today we served a two minutes silence in honour of all the men and animals that fought and fell in the war. I always find this emotional having had my grandfather in the navy and although this wasn't his war it still brings a lot of emotion and pride for those brave individuals. Did you know that over 16 million animals were used in the war with nearly 8 million horses/ mules and donkeys losing their lives. Not only did I serve my two minutes for those amazing brave men but also for all those animals.

Lunch time

I am covered on section at around midday by another keeper as we all take turns to be in there, and I get round to cleaning out the rats and given them ample enrichment. I scrubbed the floors and removed all enrichment and then replaced it with a huge comfy dog bed full of blankets, made a hammock with a bed sheet, a den in the corner for them to hide in and a few different sized boxes with more fluffy blankets in for them to snuggle into. Then it was lunch at 1pm the best part of the day to literally eat to your hearts content! As its winter time our lunch is shorter and then it was time for me to do encounters, my first was a talk about our donkeys which i focused on the importance of grooming and picking out their feet. The second encounter was a talk about our giant tortoises which was super busy with at least 20 + families crammed in to hear me speak.. It is so nerve wrecking and I panic every time but I get the job done and my talks now last about 8 minutes rather than 3 when I used to skip as much as I could haha.

Time to close..

Shutting the section down is super crazy as we have many different areas to close and tonight I was in our "outback" area which had all the public walk-throughs with the goats and the wallabies and the windows to clean lucky we only have 15 to do, we have to give all our animals an evening feed and check they are all well before we go home. It takes about 5 of us to close the outback part so we all have our own jobs to do mine was feeding wallabies, sheep and goats (nightmare), clean the stable where the donkeys were, and clean all the public areas. Then I had to walk round and check the juniors staff work to ensure I was happy with it, tonight was a good night all the animals were fine and healthy before bed so we were about to leave on time before we were asked to rush up to the reindeer field as we had to get them fed so it meant we left late again tonight but oh well I got to see one of my favourites... Ronnie!

So there is an insight to my day I hope you enjoyed it! Tomorrow I am going to write about the highlights of my day i'll pick an animal I work with and do a profile on them as well as the super cool facts about that species and what you can do to help them if you wanted!

Species for Sunday will be - Reindeer

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