1st Day At Work!

G'day.

 

Soooo I'm way behind on my posts haha. Sooo much has happened that I don't I'm almost afraid to start writing since I feel like I'll never stop! I'll eventually do the other posts about the Bridging the Cultures thing with the rainforest and the Great Barrier Reef!
But I'm going to just work on what I've worked with/on so far at the zoo!

So Nakeisha and I started yesterday at the zoo!

Very exciting. It was around a 50 minute bus ride with roundabouts every block or so. (Not really) But it felt like it. We were turning so much I was starting to get a little car sick. Bleh Haha but I felt better once we got there.

The zoo is so beautiful. It's basically sitting in a rainforest and they really did a good job incorporating the natural scenery into the zoo environment. It's a smaller zoo, but still really cool. They really allow the guests to interact with the animals which is great for education and allowing people to feel a better connection to the animals. They have kangaroos, wallabies, koalas, cassowaries, wombats, crocs, many tropical birds, birds of prey, and I'm sure plenty of reptiles.. I haven't been to the reptile house yet. 

So Nakeisha got our assignments, each one of us is going to work in one department for 2 weeks. So I start with BIRDS!!!! (@Gem + Dana) followed by reptiles, and mammals last. Nakeisha starts with mammals then goes to birds then reptiles last... I think.

So I went to the "hospital" where they have all the food for all the animals and met some of the birds people. I basically hung out with Khristina all day, she's a bird/mammal zoo keeper. She's really sweet and we went around cleaning the ponds of most of the bird exhibits. Next we went over to this truck with lots of branches with leaves on it. We grabbed a lot of branches and sorted them out to give to the birds to tear up/make the exhibit look nicer. The zoo recycles the eucalyptus branches from the koalas as well as other plants that have been overgrown then give it to the birds to rip up or just hid in. That was really cool. So once we grabbed our branches we went to some of the enclosures. The rooms behind all these exhibits are so freaking tiny. I have no idea why they are so tiny. It can barely hold 2 people and now we are bringing a freaking tree into the mix. It was quite crazy. So Khristina gave me a quick intro on what to do. The exhibits have long, black cylinder pots hanging with plants in them. So first you remove the old plant, empty the water, fill with new water, and add the new branch. See, it seems really easy, and maybe for anyone else in the world it would have been. But naturally it was a huge fiasco with me haha.

So I go into this really small enclosure with a little kingfisher and a fruit dove and I see the pot and the branch and I'm all like, "Oh I totally got this" and then I grabbed the branch. Well the branch went in the pot a lot more than I thought and it was little too big for the enclosure in general so I try to pull it out and it was stuck so I had to pull and shake the stupid branch wit all my might scaring the shit out of the two little birds. They were fluttering around like crazy while I'm losing a wrestling match with the stupid branch. I finally got the branch out with the exhibit totally and completely covered in leaves. Awkward. So I take the branch out to the behind the scenes room and come back to do the water part. Then I realized how easy it was to take the pot off the wall. So I could have just taken the stupid pot off and taken the branch out and didn't have to cause permanent emotional scarring on the fruit dove and kingfisher. Sorry :(

After discovering that handy little trick, it was much faster to do the rest of the pots and branches. So I basically became an interior designer for birds! ;D We worked on that until lunch.
Here are some final products!!

After lunch, we did some odd jobs working with different birds. I helped feed the juvenile male cassowary which was really cool and I helped trim one of the exhibits since it was growing all crazy. Well... I just held the ladder in place and watched a tiny wallaby eat a strawberry c:

That was basically my day!