The highlight of my summer this year has definitely been going to Blackpool Zoo for my Gold DofE Residential. I went with a company called Sam Sykes. One of the conditions of going on your DofE residential is going with people that you've never met. The group that I went with had 24 people (22 girls and 2 boys) and we all had at least one thing in common: our love for animals.
The first night (Sunday) consisted of ice breakers, deciding on which room to sleep in, going through rules and having a relatively formal meal. As nobody knew each other before hand we were all keen to talk to everyone and get to know them. I ended up in a room with two girls, Jenny and Kath. Jenny is in Uni studying zoology and Kath would like to do medicine. On the first evening we spent our time getting to know each other and talking about what we were most excited to experience during the course of the week.
The first day at the zoo mostly consisted of paper work. We had to sign risk assessment sheets and we told of the dangers of working in a zoo. Despite the somewhat scary introduction nobody was put off and we went on a tour of the zoo. Blackpool Zoo have recently had 2 tiger cubs and 2 wolf pups, which we were very excited to see. Before we had to go home we had the opportunity to meet the tapirs, penguins and feed the pelicans. We had to be careful of the tapirs' teeth when feeding them carrots and bananas as they are very sharp. We got to stroke one of the penguins which I expected to be less soft than he was. The pelicans fought over the fish that we were throwing to them which we found quite funny. Did you know that pelicans can hold up to 14 liters of water in their beaks, which is more than their stomachs can hold?
During the course we had lessons on a range of different aspects of the zoo. We learnt about the roles of a modern zoo, about reptiles and mammals and about conservation and research. I wasn't expecting to be having lessons while on the course but they were actually very interesting. As we all want to work with animals in the future or have an interest in them, the lessons weren't at all boring. In the afternoon we had practical sessions relating to the morning's lessons.
The day that we were learning about reptiles we went and cleaned out the tortoises and also fed them. We met Blackpool Zoo's 90 year old tortoise, Darwin. Before we went to the enclosure we picked handfuls of plantain which the tortoises love to eat. We had to wash the windows so that the public could see in, remove wet straw and replace the water in the enclosure. After this we looked around the reptile house and fed and held two snakes.
When we were learning about mammals we cleaned out and feed the giraffes. I didn't realise that the giraffes would actually smell as much as they did but I'd like to think that we made their enclosure smell a lot nicer than it did before. After meeting the giraffes we went to the family friendly farm. We fed alpacas, pigs, sheep and horses. We also held a rabbit and a ferret.
I think the most interesting day for me was the conservation and research day. We learnt about how zoos go about conservation. The two main coordinators of breeding programmes are EEPs and ESBs. EEPs stands for European Endangered Species Programmes which tell zoos what they must do when it comes to moving animals and bringing in new ones. ESBs stands for European Studbooks who recommend what zoos should do with less endangered species. Zoos will only breed animals if they have somewhere to put them as they don't want any surplus animals.
We did our own research project, which I may type up and put on my blog because it was very interesting. We researched The Effect of Enrichment on Brown Headed Spider Monkeys (Atheles fuscipes). We talked about the different methods of doing research and how to write up our results.
Over the course of the week we had to do a project. We had to design and produce a species specific enrichment device and an enrichment device if we had all the money in the world. We did this project in groups of three and we had access to dissertations, journals and the books in the zoo office. We also got to go and study the animal that we were producing the device for so that we could design an effective enrichment device. I will also be writing a blog post about the enrichment devices that my group designed.
On the last day we watched the sea lion show, met the sea lions and presented our enrichment devices to the group and gave them to the animals. Along with meeting the sea lions we met and moisturised an aardvark who lived with two friendly meerkats who came up and sniffed us. We also went in with the lemurs, which was the highlight of the week. The lemurs jumped all over us and pried our hands open to try and get grapes out of them. I really liked the way that they sat on our shoulders looking around and waiting for us to feed them.
Overall I found this experience incredible and if I was offered to do it again I wouldn't even think twice about saying yes. If only it could have lasted longer.
