Monday, July 2, 2012

Giraffe!

Tuesday- This week I'm on giraffe! Which is very exciting since it's my favorite to be on. I was on it with Nicole and volunteer Brittney. I started out by taking off all the diet buckets from last night, weighing them to record what was eaten for our records. After that I helped clean up the buckets and the stalls. When that was all done I helped Hope in Grevy by cleaning up the stalls. Britney and I worked on this together to get it done quickly.

After that it was time for the all staff meeting. At these meetings all of the staff (hence the name) gets together so that we can catch up on whats going on in different departments and with the zoo. In this meeting we talked about lots of different things, but two of the main topics were the corpse flower and our episode on Chronicle.

Class was canceled for the day since we were going to be outside and it was supposed to rain, so no class information to report of.

Wednesday- I was on giraffe with Nicole again today. I once again helped with food prep and cleaning, and then again headed over to help Hope in Grevy. Thankfully she was almost done so it took almost no time at all.

When that was done I went with Nicole to a giraffe feeding encounter which we do everyday now, three times a day, for $5 a person. It's a really good deal considering how close you get to Beau. The people that we were with doing the encounter was a small family of four, with two very young girls. I'd say they were no older than two or three. The older of the two wasn't too sure about feeding such a large animal, but the little one was so brave!! I was so surprised that she had no fear of feeding him!

After that we had a staff meeting just to check in with everything that's been going on in the department. It was good to heard from everyone and just catch up on stuff.

Once that meeting was done we did our delivery, and then started the close up for the day.

Thursday- To begin the day I went off with Amanda to help fix some of the mesh around the trees in the savanah exhibit that was falling off. We keep the mesh there so that the animals don't eat at the bark and kill the trees. There were three of us that went out to do this project, but it really only needed two, so I went off to rake up some old hay. Once the raking was done, there wasn't much for me to do so I decided to clean under the bed of the truck where hay often gets caught around the spare tire.

After that I headed off to giraffe to help out Andrea. I did the normal things like diets and cleaning. When that was done we headed to lunch and then went to go help weed out the giraffe path a little so that it would be easier to get to the feeding landing.

Friday- Was wet!! We started out weeding the lion exhibit so that visitors can see Chris better, but of course it started to pour rain and we were soaked by 8:30am. Which of course lasted all day because work clothes don't dry out very quickly.

After all this was done I went to go help John with giraffe which included cleaning under the mats and getting a really deep clean.

After lunch we headed off to two classes, PRIDE and EPIC. PRIDE was mostly about customer service and solving problems that customers may have in a professional manner. EPIC was about creating resumes and cover letters so that they look good. Both are helpful for when we all have permenant jobs.

After all that we went off to close up and head out for the weekend!