kaberett | further adventures with fauna: Whipsnade Keeper for a Day

A month or several ago, while we were wandering around talking about something or other, A somewhat sheepishly said that he thought Animal Experiences were a Really Good Present Idea but he was concerned it was Cheating in some fashion to get me animal experiences for my birthdays because I'd Thought Of It First.

While I am absolutely a fan of saying "look at this ridiculous(ly expensive) fountain pen! wanna buy it for me?" and indeed "hey, want to buy us afternoon tea at Ruby Violet?" I am also very much on board with Surprise Animals, and that is why this time last week we were settling down to sleep in a tiny two-person cabin overlooking the Chilterns having thoroughly worn ourselves out with Keeper for a Day at ZSL Whipsnade Zoo.

a photo wood-panelled bedroom featuring a photo of lions, a vase of flowers, and some pillows

[ID: one wall of a light-coloured wooden cabin, with a print on canvas of a photograph of two lions. to the lower left, pillows in white pillowcases are visible. to the right is a chest of drawers, on top of which there are a cube-shaped box of tissues and a clear glass vase containing red and yellow roses, and purple and red-and-yellow tulips.]

This had entailed getting up early enough to Be At Whipsnade for 08³⁰, which was made all the more painful by making a surprise late-night wheelchair delivery the previous evening, but nevertheless we had an excellent time of it.

The morning started, inevitably, with paperwork -- and somewhat more evitably with Second Breakfast at the zoo, and also a bonus t-shirt we were required to put on immediately so that people could easily see whose problem we were. And then the festivities commenced.

The first stop was the chimpanzees -- or, rather, the back of the chimpanzee enclosure, where we dutifully syringed yoghurt (plain; Yeo Valley) into holes drilled a short way into bits of wood that were smaller than logs but larger than twigs, and then rolled small handfuls of nuts up in sheets of newspaper until we had three such rolls, whereupon we plaited them. The plaits got put aside for later; the yoghurt-filled logs we took around the front and hurled across the lake to the chimpanzees, for their enrichment, and also the enrichment of the school trip that got to both watch us do this and also get slightly little bit covered in yoghurt spatter. (The enrichment for us was, obviously, having enrichment explained to us, plus a refresher on underarm bowling...)

Then it was off to the rhinos! Specifically, the greater one-horned rhinos: we started out fetching wheelbarrows from the ladies' enclosure, which meant we also got to see the ladies having their early-morning shower via the medium of pressure washers, and then went to Tidy Up The Bull's Indoor Area. We apparently got lucky in that most of the dung production overnight had happened out on his pasture, but this was definitely the Completely Unglamorous bit of the experience -- we could have opted out but none of the three of us did, so first we shovelled muck and then we swept up the concrete and raked the woodchip to lie more evenly and cleared up the last of his hay from the previous day. The point that was being made, that I hadn't actually properly thought about, is that zoo keepers' roles include "making the place look nice for the visitors" in addition to the more obvious thing of "keep the animals' enclosures nice for them".

Our reward for mucking out the rhino was GETTING TO FEED HIM CABBAGE LEAVES -- through a heavy-duty fence, where his nose got stuck through between the bars in one direction and our hands absolutely did not in the other. Greater one-horned rhinos are browsers, not just grazers: that is, in addition to grass they also, like elephants and like giraffes, eat bark -- and, like elephants, they have a prehensile upper lip! In elephants the upper lip and nose together form the trunk; in these rhinos the two are still distinct but once I knew what I was looking at the anatomical similarities were obvious. Hugo was really very adept at lipping the cabbage out of our hands and was extremely patient when we dropped it on the floor instead of posting it neatly into his mouth, and when we were done with treats he obligingly ambled off for us to take photos of him from a distance. ALAS I utterly failed to get any rhino bleps.

The final stop before lunch was THE ELEPHANTS. The ladies were all out on pasture and had no interest in doing anything but grazing -- it was apparently their first day out on grass this year, because it had finally got dry enough that they wouldn't tear up the ground something awful -- but we got to see the baby (still definitely a baby!) from a distance, and saw the bull, Ming, rather closer up: he was ecstatically having a spa day. Apparently the boat fender/bumper/buoy he was using as a bath pillow had only recently been installed and he was Squeaking Emphatically about how brilliant it was! And then once he'd decided he was finished with bath time we got to chuck frozen (nutritionally appropriate) treats through the bars for him, accompanied by an explanation of the various ways Whipsnade uses protected contact to teach elephants how to participate in and cooperate with their care.

After lunch we stopped off by the recently-expanded meerkat enclosure to provide some scatter feeding for the three meerkats and two bonus magpies (the medium-term plan here is to set up a mixed-species enclosure containing the meerkats, the aardvark, and the porcupines, but introductions are going appropriately slowly so Not Quite Yet) en route to the giraffes, which were an absolute highlight.

Specifically, we got to pretend to be trees! By which I mean "we got handed willow branches and told how to offer them to the giraffes": adults had to stand with their chest up against the high bars at the top of the fencing and lean over to reach the branches; the baby had to stick his head over those same bars, not under or between them. Leaves were the highest priority: the two adults and one baby who came to munch (adult #3 decided we were insufficiently interesting and went to hang out indoors) systematically removed all of the leaves, then went back for a second browse to remove the bark. It was fascinating watching them -- they were clearly making extremely deliberate decisions about which bit they wanted to go for next, and were signalling those decisions clearly enough that it was straightforward to make things slightly easier and more accessible for them. (While on the one hand Challenging Food is Good Enrichment, on the other Making The Monkeys Do What You Want is probably even better, so I am not too worried about that aspect of it...) We weren't to stroke them deliberately, but between the baby being clumsy and me having stripped a handful of remaining bark of my branch when we thought they'd all had enough and wandered off, two of them wound up touching me with their noses, and I am delighted to report that they are incredibly soft and fuzzy and honestly extremely similar to the soft fuzz of horse's noses and upper lips. Also getting to see the tongues close-up was great: I have been Delighted by the idea of Giraffe Tongues Are Blue ever since I first heard the fact!

We paused en route to the penguins to watch the wolverine(s) boinging around fantastically (So Much Flollop), and also peer at the bears (more being introduced: three in one enclosure, one in another). Actually at the penguins I was delighted to see both Humboldt and Rockhopper eggs! We also spotted the year-old Rockhopper chick but did not manage to glimpse the Very Fresh And New this season's Rockhopper baby. And this is also where I noped emphatically out of an aspect of the experience: I really sincerely did try picking up a defrosted dead fish to stuff a pill into its gills, but the texture was sufficiently Awful that I put it right back in the bucket and had to strip the gloves off straight away also because I Could Not Cope with the idea of the gloves that had Touched That Texture remaining on my hands. (I think the keepers babysitting us were mildly surprised that I opted equally emphatically out of flinging fish at the penguins! but my Nope was about the texture, not about squeamishness specific to vitamin pills, so The "Fun" Bit was not going to be any more fun for me than the messy bit.) A very obligingly chucked fish in directions according to my whims when I had them, though, and I did not feel at all deprived.

AND THEN FINALLY our last stop for the day was the Bird Arena, where we had to answer some preliminary questions about whether we were safe to go near the birds ("have you been near any birds in the last 48 hours?" "yes, an owl experience on Tuesday"; "... have you been around any poultry or game birds?" "... yes, the ones being used with the owls we saw on Tuesday..."; "... have you been near any live poultry or gam--" "nope!" "OKAY FINE", approx) and then! we got! to meet! a very rare hornbill (~~I have, I am afraid, forgotten the precise species~~ aha, no, he's a Visayan hornbill, because his name -- I now recall -- is Panini, thanks be to the ZSL inventory), who was lovely; and their burrowing owl (I think she's called Etty?), who -- much like Squeak -- yelled pretty much constantly and who also obligingly ran around on the grass preposterously for us. (We'd seen her once previously, when she was refusing to go into the specially-installed bit of drainpipe between the public portion of the arena and the backstage area birds get brought in via, until all of a sudden she lost her footing and slid inelegantly down it, squawking all the way.)

And that was it: back we went to the Visitor Centre, where we were given another warm drink and a snack, and also a certificate, and were encouraged to chat about what our favourite bits had been and I think to generally decompress though I do not now quite recall why this was considered necessary...

... and then it was time to fetch the car from the main car park and head up to the lodges for the Zoo Sleepover.

Eastern Bongo, white rhinos, chimps again (tool use!), brief pause by the European bison, old elephant house, baby wallaby, tigers
dinner
flamingoes (including getting to watch them FLUFF), aardvark (swung by earlier after the meerkats when both they and the porcupine were Asleep), BONUS BATS
OH WAIT ALSO we saw a pair of cheetahs. and when we were looking at the rhinos this evening there were BONUS DUCKLINGS, and then there were More bonus ducklings on the way to the flamingoes, and also also both bar-headed and emperor geese are Very Pretty
AND we saw the two new lionesses!!!