Shape shifting
19 Mar 2011 Leave a Comment
in Discovery Bay Tags: dolphins
St. Patrick’s Day at the zoo: Nothing too unusual happened until I spent a scheduled hour at the dolphin window in Discovery Bay. All three dolphins have been gravitating to the two smaller pools behind the show pool — especially mama Allie, who has shunned the spotlight a bit since her own mother, April, died last month. A feeding/training session around noon is the norm, but this time the trainers added a twist: They came downstairs from the stadium and coaxed the dolphins to the viewing window. And instead of an enticing bucket of fish, the trainers wielded colorful cutout shapes: a rectangle for daddy Semo, a star for Allie, a circle for eight-month-old Taijah.
I’ve seen shape training used a lot with the zoo’s other marine-mammal rock stars, the otters and bears of Russia’s Grizzly Coast. But I’d never seen it used with dolphins. Fellow volunteer Henry and I each took a side of the window and held back the gathering crowd as the dolphins came forward. Here is trainer Robyn with Semo; a year and a half ago, when this blog was just a baby, I spent a delirious 20 minutes with the two of them up in the stadium while she showed me how to feed him fish and taught me dolphin-friendly hand signals.
And here comes Allie, who’s been leery of this section of the show pool. Somehow she must associate her star with good things. Or maybe she just likes Robyn.
Taijah has come a long way since emerging into the world as a 30-pounder on a stormy Saturday night in July. (I was descending in a wind-tossed plane toward a Twin Cities runway that night, so I remember that thunderstorm and the next day’s newborn news.) From the looks of this photo, she might outweigh Robyn, though she’s nowhere near her mama Allie’s likely weight of 350-400 pounds. Before she came to the window, Taijah was playing with a ball at the water’s surface, clasping it between her pectoral fins and nudging it with her bottlenose rostrum. Here she’s treating us to a bubble stream through her blowhole, apparently on command. The baby, her elderly dad and her mom are still not giving “shows,” per se — just training sessions — but I still count this mini-event as a special treat.
