Keeper for the Day

A few months ago Scarlett and I started researching various zoo experiences for her birthday present this year. She has always been really into animals, loves all her soft toys, is very good at caring for pets and watches animal programmes on TV at every opportunity. She has several DS games to do with animals and has said she wants to be a zookeeper when she grows up for a couple of years now.

The two nearest zoos to us are Drusillas – which is a small zoo really and more about being a visitor attraction with a few animals than a serious zoo with a conservation and breeding programme. They have mostly monkeys, lemurs, birds and rodents there. They do a Keeper for the Day for £120 which is open to children aged 6 plus. The other option was Marwell which is a proper zoo with lions, tigers, elephants, giraffes etc. This is rather reflected in the price however and for the same £120 we could have booked a half hour Animal Encounter with limited exposure to one single animal. There was no contest really :).

I’d hoped to book the day for Scarlett’s actual birthday, last Saturday and have a good sized audience of family and friends to watch her and meet up with us at lunchtime for birthday cake etc. but weekend KftD were booked right through til July 2009 so we went for yesterday as the closest date available to her birthday. For various reasons the family and friends we had invited couldn’t make it and in the end it was just us yesterday. I think it was actually for the best as it was a freezing cold day and I’d have felt bad about having dragged anyone else there to walk round in the cold and it meant that while I was off with Tarly Davies got to be with Ady and have a nice day of one to one with him.

Scarlett was incredibly excited about the day and had been flicking through the folder of information they’d sent when we booked it regularly. She’s talked about it at Rainbows and told various friends about it.

So the day started at 10am – we were slightly early so hung around in the carpark and Davies and Scarlett were impressed by the frozen spider webs and played on a seesaw in the playarea in the car park. And admired the Christmas tree adorned with cuddly zoo animals.



while I fretted with some odd fear that she would get this close to her day and somehow manage to jinx it by breaking her arm or something!

The shutters rolled up and Debbie the keeper was there to meet us. Ady and Davies had to pay to get in and after telling them we’d be at the meerkats in about 45 minutes they headed off to look round while we went into the first ‘off limits’ area of the staff kitchen where Tarly was given her name badge for the day. She also got a jumper with a Drusillas badge on the front and KEEPER FOR THE DAY on the back but it was too cold to be without a coat so she brought that home and is currently wearing it in bed :).

The zoo is arranged in a sort of donut shape around a central off limits area which has various gates into various parts of the zoo. We took the long route round for the first time though and Scarlett was introduced to all the animals through the tunnel area – lizards, snakes, crocodiles, mongoose, various pygmy monkeys. She got told all their names and some gossipy information about them all such as who was dangerous (the snake had put one of the keepers in hospital, the crocodiles are *always* locked away before keepers go into to feed them or clean out their enclosure) and various other trivia.

We went to the kitchens where the animal feeds are prepared and were shown all round that – there is a corn store for various dried food, a cold room for the fruit and vegetables (many of which are out of date or split packaging items from the local Sainsburys), giant freezers for the meat (chicks, rats, mice etc.) and a room with the jumping insects which are the only live food any of the animals get and is therefore also an area where they are looked after and fed themselves until they are needed to be the food! The first animals Scarlett was feeding were the meerkats who were having mealworms for their breakfast. There are clipboards with details of feeds (food, weight, frequency etc.) for each animal and who is looking after them for that day. Debbie explained that animals in captivity have to have strictly controlled diets as they are not having to expend as much energy searching for food, roaming such a large area or necessarily getting the same diet as they would in the wild.

We quickly fed the pigs on the way to the meerkats – they have one boar and two sows kune-kune pigs which were being fed dried food pellets that morning. They are not bred there so are kept seperate. They have been known to bite and their teeth are huge and kept trimmed like rabbits are:

Then it was off to the meerkats. On the way Scarlett paused to show them through the glass what they were about to get 🙂

she also stopped to chat to a couple of smaller children and showed them the mealworms and told them what they were and where they were going 🙂

Once in the enclosure she threw the mealworms to the meerkats and then had to clean down all the glass panels of the enclosure while Debbie raked over the ground as it was cold and hard. The meerkats make a really cute noise and are very curious little things. We were not allowed to touch them but they didn’t afford us the same treatment and I had one rest it’s front paws on my leg to investigate the rip in the knee of my jeans while another had a nibble of Tarly’s shoes 🙂

When she’d cleaned the glass panels Scarlett had to clean the clear dome which extends into the enclosure from a tunnel underneath so people can poke their head into the middle and look around – guess who was looking out as she was cleaning it? 🙂

Next stop was the porcupines. They are not aggressive but their spikes can be nasty so they are shut out into the outdoor enclosure while their bed area is cleaned out. They are quite stinky. First Scarlett had to sweep up all the old bedding (hay and sawdust)

then redo it with fresh sawdust and create a nice new bed for them.

once again she had an audience 😉


then the porcupines were let back in and Scarlett fed them (fruit and veg and nuts – they love coconut too).

We saw some old quills and learnt about the tail ones which can be rattled together to make a noise to scare predators and the back ones which have barbs (similar to the needle felting needles). They’re funny old creatures.

We stopped to chat to some baby goats, met some off show creatures – a fennec fox which is about to finish her six months quarantine having come from Spain, five bats which have come to join the rest of the bats and were recovering from a long journey off show before being introduced to the enclosure with the others. Then it was tea break time in the staff kitchen. Tarly had a hot chocolate which helped to warm her up.

The next job was more food preparation – infact a keepers whole day (which is a fairly long one) is taken up with feeding and cleaning out really. There are other elements to the job too but that makes up the bulk of it. This time there was chopping up to do for the lemurs food so Scarlett got busy with knife on some apples, cabbage and bananas


The food preparation is all a bit like a dance with various people chopping and mixing and then leaving in various places ready for others to come and collect it to feed it to the animals – all very organised.

Debbie had to provide some enrichment for the bats and the mongooses in the shape of food they’d need to work for so we went to the enrichment room and selected some long sticks to thread some food onto for the bats and a basket for the mongoose (who I always feel I should call mongeese in the plural). The bat food is cheerio shaped pellets which Scarlett soaked in water and then threaded onto the sticks.

For the mongooses they put some crickets or locusts into a pot with a lid on and brought it along with a hanging basket filled with hay. We gathered up the lemur food too and headed off to the yellow mongoose and porcupine area. The porcupines had not had a lot of food earlier so they were fed some more and then we entered their enclosure from the other side while they were busy with their coconut. The hanging basket of straw was hung up and the insects buried in the straw for the mongooses to find/.

Next to the bat cave!

Scarlett and Debbie hung the sticks with their threaded food up and the bats soon flew over to investigate. The bats there are all males (so they don’t breed) and are a daytime bat called Rodriguez fruit bats from Rodrigues Island. As they are not nocturnal they have large eyes and far better eyesight than most bats. I like bats, Scarlett was slightly less keen for some reason.

Next we went on to the pets corner where Tarly got to hold mice, rabbits and guinea pigs


then things got a bit more exotic with some lizard stroking, some tortoise holding and an up close encounter with a corn snake!

Off to feed the prairie dogs next. They semi-hibernate through winter but a couple came out to see what was happening and Tarly put the rest of their food down their burrows 🙂

They get called ‘ground squirrels’ and you can see why, they have very similar faces and the same mannerisms when eating.

Another part of a keepers job is to give keeper talks at various times during the day. Drusillas opened Lemurland last year which is a walk through area with ring tailed lemurs. This has long been Scarlett’s favourite area as there is always a keeper on hand who knows loads both generally about lemurs and specifically about the group of 10 they have there. Both Davies and Scarlett have chatted to the keeper there before at length so it felt odd to be part of the keeper talk time. Davies and Ady were there to watch along with various other people so the keeper chatted to them and answered their questions while Tarly fed the lemurs

That took us to 115pm so we arranged to meet back up with Debbie after lunch and we headed to the soft play place for warm drinks for me and Ady, lunch for Tarly (Ady and Davies had already eaten) and a play in the warm for the children. We got an hours break but the real keepers only get 30 minutes so Debbie was off doing something else before we met back up with her again at 215pm.

Next to be fed were the fruit beetles in bug world so back for fruit chopping duty again. Also due to be fed were the capybara so that was prepared at the same time. We went to bug world first and Debbie talked to Scarlett about various bugs and spiders that are in there including the leafcutter ants which are fascinating to watch. The fruit beetles get fed fruit on sticks so Tarly did some threading onto sticks and then pushing into the ground:

We then spent some time walking round various animals we’d not been past before and Debbie told Scarlett more facts about them and Tarly had some questions too. Then with super large bucket in hand we headed off to the capybara

They share an enclosure with the mara and the beavers – and therefore share food too.
They are called Tallulah and Benson (the only names of animals that stuck in my head) and are giant rodents and really quite strange creatures:

We walked round to the coati then and watched them being fed – two chicks each followed by various fruit and veg. Tarly wanted to feed them some chicks but wasn’t wearing gloves so Debbie said no. We went passed the racoons and lemurs again and met up with Ady and Davies to go to the penguins for the last keeper talk of the day. Back behind the scenes again to collect a big bucket of fish and don gloves for Tarly and then into the penguin enclosure. Debbie did the keeper talk and introduced Scarlett as the keeper for the day while Scarlett lobbed fish in the water and the penguins went crazy eating them

It was by then very cold and practically dark and the day was over at about 430pm. We went back through the off limits areas, this time with Ady and Davies coming too back to the offices where Scarlett was given a certificate, her KftD jumper and a pack of various literature including a feedback questionnaire. Then we were let out of the shutters as the park was closing.

Scarlett declared it the best day EVER and is already adamant she wants the same present for her seventh birthday :).

What I liked about it was the genuine keeper for a day-ness of it, it wasn’t a glorified picture presented, it was the real schedule of a keeper and gave Scarlett a real insight into what it would be to work there and be a keeper one day.