feeding, training and future plans

Expedition Madagascar has been so much fun. My greatest challenge is learning all of the animals names! So far, I have done lots of cleaning, feeding and training...like always. Madagascar has animals that I can get close and even interact with. Today, I got to feed our hog-nose snakes snakes some rats. This was a thrilling experience since I have never done this before. Snakes are really fast and very strong. Fortunately, our male hog-nose is very friendly and likes to slither between my hands and arms; sometimes all over me while I clean their display!

In addition to training, I train our lemurs every day. We use a PVC pipe as a target indicator, make the lemurs touch this with their nose and use a training clicker to let them know they did something right. We also use raisins as a tasty reward. However, we don't give them raisins every time so that they do not become dependent only on treats for a reward. When we train, we try to get them familiar with staying still on weight scales, a stand to receive a puncture from a needle and many more exercises. We do this because we want to make sure our lemurs are ready for anything we need them to do instead of being new to a certain procedure we need them to do. This is my favorite part of the day! :) I also like training since lemurs tend to me known as pick pocketers. They tend to sneak up behind me or crawl up my lag to steal some raisins from my pocket stash. Despite their rude manners, their cuteness overrides this.

Even though my summer is coming to an end, I feel like I have really found my niche in life is. I love the zoo atmosphere! Since I love doing this kind of work so much, I have already applied to get next summer's plans come to life. Hopefully I will receive another internship next summer here or in Denver, CO, or receive a summer keeper job in Omaha. Wish me luck!

I apologize for not having many pictures lately, but most of my work consists of "behind the scenes" in which I cannot show, however, I do have one picture from today that I can share with a lemur. I hope you like it!