Admiring Monet

Any zoo demo is a fun zoo demo, but of the half-dozen animals I demonstrate routinely, I have my favorites and less-favorites, as do all volunteers. Snakes are the best in my book; salamanders are, well, a lot less active and interactive (and can’t be touched because as amphibians, they absorb substances too easily through their skin). The painted turtle usually falls somewhere in between, but last week he had a stellar outing with a handful of kids who somehow knew how to bond with him.

This is Monet, a male painted turtle. We don’t always let him run loose on this cart, but my fellow volunteer Darlene (who’s attached to that hand) put the sides up, and although the zoo was once again swarming with school groups, most of the kids were behaving well enough and agreeing not to touch him. We’ve demo’d Monet many times before, but I don’t remember this level of mutual fascination between him and his audience.

Painted turtles are common in Minnesota lakes, and my husband says he often swam with them as a boy at his extended family’s summer cabin. My favorite facts to share with kids: the males (like Monet) have smaller bodies but longer claws and tails than the females; they live in wet places and sunbathe on logs to rid themselves of leeches and absorb vitamin D through their shells; their average lifespan is 25 years; the warmer the place where they lay their eggs, the more females will develop and hatch. And of course painted turtles have that pretty orange underside, almost worthy of the painter himself.

I don’t do demos every week, so I was glad to do one on my last day at the zoo before a monthlong hiatus. I won’t be volunteering or blogging for the rest of May, as I finish up a part-time grad-school program, but I’ll be back with a vengeance in June. By then, the zoo will have a summer Africa exhibit (giraffes again, at last!) and another temporary dinosaur exhibit. I can hardly wait to check it all out.

The cruelest month?

April always brings hordes of people to the zoo –  last Sunday, just a week ago, more than 7,000 stopped by. Each year they come to see the family farm, newly reopened for the season, with its fresh crop of spring babies (the piglets are my favorite). They come in the form of school groups or families finishing up their spring vacations. The zoo is so crowded in these last two months of the school year, it can be challenging to take a step or hear a word. On Thursday morning, though, the zoo was practically empty as a winter storm struck the Twin Cities. By noon, 75 guests had shown up — one person for every hundred in attendance four days earlier. It was eerie and, to me, wonderful.

Here’s the Northern Trail around 10 a.m. Thursday. The roads were a chaotic mess out there in the real world, but in here, alone and on foot, I was enveloped by silent order and snowy peace.

I must have been the day’s first passerby at the Tiger Lair. The cubs — or at 10 months, they’re practically young ladies now — seemed surprised to see me, or anyone.

The lone moose on exhibit appeared to be slurping a slushy from a tree branch, and robins were hopping about as if the landscape wasn’t a version of frozen tundra. A fellow volunteer told me later that at least one robin has been occupying the stretch between the Tiger Lair and the Central Plaza all winter. That’s where I saw this one as I headed out and again after doubling back. He was quite shy, and it took a good 20 attempts to capture him in my frame.

Back inside,  the Tropical Reef was a warmer oasis of quiet, though I had the company of several volunteers and three aquarists there.

One aquarist, Diver Dan, kept peeking around the corner to see if he should put on his gear and do the 10:30 dive show. In 30 minutes, just one woman and her toddler came by, so the dive show didn’t happen — the fish were fed from above. We volunteers pretended to insist he should go in there just for us, and Dan pretended to demand $20 in payment for doing so. Meanwhile, we admired the new male zebra shark — the lighter one on the right — that has recently joined the female. Could there be shark pups soon?

Can sharks cuddle? Is that what’s happening here? I’m not sure I want to think about it. One thing I noticed about the new male shark: his tiny blue eye. Another thing I learned about our female: Not only is she eyeless, but she was likely born that way; she was wild-caught from the ocean, so nobody’s sure.

Nobody’s quite sure what this upside-down business is all about, either, or at least I’m not. She was swimming with vigor before and after striking this pose. It reminded me of my dog demanding a belly-rub.

I finished my zoo-day an hour early; because of the weather, the volunteers were free to go after lunch. My last gig was at the chicks-and-bunnies station, holding this Mini Satin rabbit for kids to touch. Bunny handling makes me nervous, because the bunnies themselves are often very nervous; we take care not to handle them too much, or let the kids touch them TOO much, and you always have to strike a balance between letting one escape and squeezing its delicate little bones too hard. This bunny, however, was a portrait of calm, and holding him or her for about 20 minutes was a total delight. The few children who stopped by were gentle and obedient when told to stroke the bunny with just a couple of fingers, one child at at time, only on the back (the ears are such a tempting target!). After the bunny, and after lunch, I left for my “real” job feeling as satisfied as if I’d spent an entire day among the animals. The relentless grip of winter is driving Minnesota crazy right now, but for one morning in zoo-land,  it provided a comforting retreat.

A pigeon and his person

It’s neither routine nor highly unusual to see a bird strolling or strutting the walkway in the zoo’s Tropics aviary. It’s more unusual to see a bird and a zookeeper interacting on the walkway together, as I did yesterday. Ben had just reentered the walkway, apparently after restocking some bird-food dishes in the jungly undergrowth, and this Victoria crowned pigeon followed him out and appeared to be stalking him.

As Ben told a gathering crowd of intrigued guests, his stack of supplies is functioning partly as a shield here, because this particular pigeon likes to wing-slap people’s legs. (This hurts the wings at least as much as the legs, so keepers discourage the behavior for the birds’ own good.) All Victoria crowned pigeons look basically the same, with males slightly larger (at up to 30 inches long and 5 pounds), but Ben says he knows this one by its leg-banding and also its personality, which seems less docile than website descriptions of the breed suggest. This man-bird pair seemed to have a warily affectionate “frenemy” type of vibe going on, and the pigeon rushed at me once with wings outspread when I got too close with the camera.

Sometimes zookeepers bestow their own names on the animals they care for, but Ben said that wasn’t the case with this guy. Nonetheless, he described Mr. Victoria (as I guess I’m calling him now) as a good dad to the two-month-old hatchling hidden somewhere in the aviary trees. That’s typical of this species, in which the dads choose the nesting site and do half-time duty incubating the single egg laid by their mate. Moms and dads also take turns feeding the hatchling “crop milk,” as explained by the Toronto Zoo, which had the most thorough and interesting pigeon page I could find.

As Ben pointed out, Victoria crowneds are the world’s largest living pigeon and a relative of the dodo bird — a 40-pounder in its heyday. Arguably the zoo’s most visually striking bird, these vividly blue creatures are native to Papua New Guinea and Indonesia, where they’re a threatened species hunted for their feathers and their meat. They don’t look much like Queen Victoria to me, even with that fancy headgear, but they’re a lot of fun to watch, as long as you protect your shins.

Maternal sloth

There’s always something new at the zoo to keep volunteers invigorated, and last week it was the sloth baby — only the second born here, on Feb. 3. Thursday was mom’s first day back on exhibit with baby. The sloth normally lives at the “Creatures Beneath the Canopy” end of the Tropics trail with our other Central and South American animals, but the nearby large windows and glass doors make it too cold for sloths in winter — their body temperature changes with their environment, reptile-like, and they’re not muscular enough to warm themselves by shivering. This year, instead of going off exhibit entirely, the sloth took up residence with chinchillas at the end of the old Nocturnal Trail in Tropics. All you can see of the baby in this picture are its two left legs; it sleeps on its mom’s belly, and sloths sleep 15 hours a day even when they’re not new moms, and they’re most active at night. But this is the best look and only decent picture of a sloth I’ve ever gotten, since they’re usually tucked among foliage with their faces hidden.

Two-toed sloths are pregnant for about five months. Delivery typically takes less than an hour and, like everything else in a sloth’s life except defecating, happens while mom is hanging upside down in a tree. Two-toed sloths have two toes — or as you can see here, claws ideal for hooking onto trees — on each front foot and three on each hindfoot.  The fascinating facts about them go on and on; many appear on the excellent website for the Sloth Sanctuary in Costa Rica. (Three-toed sloths have tails and extra vertebrae, so they’re a whole other story.) We have another pregnant sloth at the zoo, so in time, this baby will not only emerge into full view but should also gain a playmate. I’m not sure sloths actually play, even when they’re little, but time will tell.

Seven dwarfs: a cephalopod story

Several months after I predicted his end was near in September, the big European cuttlefish in Discovery Bay went off exhibit after the holidays and completed his lifespan at the usual age of 18 months. I call him the big cuttlefish because, though less than a foot long, he was a giant compared with the seven dwarf cuttlefish that have since taken up residence in his tank. They’re about twice the size of my thumbnail now (here’s one next to a fellow volunteer’s finger for perspective), but they’re also less than four months old and eventually will stretch out to a full four inches.

These tiny cephalopods (or cuttlets, as the Zooborns website cutely calls the babies of their species) are still growing into their final shape, but if you gaze at them long enough, the key features emerge — especially the eight arms and two tentacles sprouting from each tiny head. Their main difference from their European predecessor, size aside, is their habitat: the tropical Indian and Pacific oceans instead of the Atlantic. These seven came from the Monterey Bay Aquarium on the central California coast.

When the first four cuttlets entered the tank a few weeks ago, they were kept in a small transparent crate so that aquarist Becky could find them and feed them even tinier mysid shrimp. Last week, we volunteers were told they had the run of the place but that three new cuttlets had joined the crate. But when several of us went to take a look, we saw that the crate was gone and all seven had deployed themselves throughout their aquarium. And indeed, they were big enough to track down. Two or three anchored themselves in this treelike plant. My fellow volunteer Carol, in particular, kept wandering away and then wandering back to see how many had relocated. They were all too relaxed to squirt ink, as stressed cephalopods do, but one showed off his ability to change color, from a milky white to a deep brown. I can’t wait to see what they’re up to this week, and how much bigger they’ve grown.

Social climber

So here’s a pop quiz, or perhaps a trick question: Can dogs climb trees?

A week ago, I went to an all-day seminar for zoo volunteers. In her part of the presentation, Northern Trail supervisor Diana Weinhardt told us several, or perhaps all seven, of the zoo’s Asian wild dogs — a highly social species also known as dholes — have been climbing a tree in their exhibit. We knew she wouldn’t lie to us, but I envisioned something short and shrubby. Thursday was finally warm enough to make the half-hour Northern Trail hike tolerable, and in the dhole-viewing gazebo, I gazed fondly at a pile of five napping Asian wild dogs before lifting my eyes and jumping half out of my skin. I mean, this tree is really pretty tall, is it not? The dhole looks as if it were photoshopped up there, but I swear it wasn’t.

My online exploration of canine tree-climbing led me to this excellent website on canids, which mentions more species of wild dog than I’d previously heard of and divides them into doglike vs. foxlike canids. There’s general agreement that only the gray fox, thanks to its curvy claws, can climb trees. But dholes, while their redness makes them look very foxlike, fall into the doglike category with wolves. Scientifically they have their own genus, Cuon. The preceding website says they’re so agile that they can pee while doing a handstand on their forelegs (not sure why they’d enjoy that). My zoo lit describes them as excellent jumpers, able to cover 10 feet in a single leap and 2o feet with a running start. Those two facts explain how the dhole got up in this tree, with its many thick, level branches, but I still wanted to see how he got down. And it took only another 10 minutes or so for that to happen.

The dhole made a cautious, clumsy descent, paw-testing each branch to see if it would support about 40 pounds of dog-weight and glancing frequently at the service road behind the exhibit. (The tree made an excellent lookout post for passing vehicles, and the dhole was fascinated by one when I first saw him.) The process didn’t look like one that would necessarily end well, and I felt a little worried. But he wasn’t much lower than this when he made his graceful leap to the ground, landing as lightly and securely as an Olympic figure skater after a basic lutz jump. I resisted the urge to applaud before I moved on.

A howl before mating

It’s Wolf Watch mating season again, when volunteers bundle up for a few weeks to spy on the zoo’s two gray wolves in half-hour shifts and tell staff if we witness a butt-to-butt “tie.” (Two months after that, pups are probable.) There’s been a bit of grumbling the past two weeks, as zero-ish temperatures collided with a general lack of activity in the exhibit. (This Tumblr by an anonymous fellow volunteer about sums it up, while confirming the wolves’ names as I’d jotted them down once — she’s Wazi, he’s Kaska.) But on Thursday, I got a bigger eyeful than expected.

For the first 15 minutes, I saw only the tips of Kaska’s black ears as he lay near the exhibit’s edge and I sat huddled under an electric blanket in the glass-enclosed wolf-viewing room. But then he stood up, executed a deep stretchy “play bow” followed by a shimmying body-shake, and walked over to the “coyote side” of his area. A few minutes later, Wazi the she-wolf, whose white fur blends so well with snow that I hadn’t seen her, also stood up, performed an identical set of maneuvers and followed him. (Here she is doing another stretchy play bow at the coyote side.)

I was debating whether to leave my chair and blanket and follow them when I heard such a ruckus that I leaped up and ran toward it. Both wolves were howling through the fence at all four coyotes, who were yipping back. Here’s Kaska in full-thr0ated howl mode. (The wolves appear to be butt-to-butt here, but I don’t believe anything actually happened.) Only a few intrepid guests appeared on the Minnesota Trail that bone-chilling midday, and I had this particular scene completely to myself.

She maintained her interest in the coyotes longer than he did.

Kaska and I had a moment together at the coyote-side window, and when he faced me head-on, I had to lower the camera for a second and gaze directly into those amber eyes, appreciating the unmediated wildness of our encounter. (My husband later said Kaska was imagining how I’d taste with steak sauce, which was probably close to the truth.) These animals, so similar in some ways to our house pets, have such a fierce untamed elegance that I never take this kind of proximity for granted. It makes braving the bitter cold worthwhile.