Month: April 2016

Bear Cam

I was working on a project this afternoon and decided to put Woodland Park Zoo’s Bear Cam up on my second computer screen as I worked. I could see the bears go by every few minutes as the walked around the enclosure.

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At one point I saw a few bunches of what looked like romaine lettuce get tossed to one of the bears.

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He sat there for 15-20 minutes munching on the romaine and a few other treats the keepers had thrown to him. They refer to this as “scatter-feeding” on the webcam page. They’re snacks through-out the day to encourage wandering the enclosure and searching for food.

I don’t know how to tell the bears apart, but there are only two. So it’s narrowed down to either Denali or Keema. 🙂

WPZ’ Web Cam page also has a Tiger Cam and a Bat Cam.

Artistic Penguin

We had an amazing experience where we got to go behind these scenes and meet a few of the penguins.

Claudia is an artist. You can see it in her eyes before getting to work:

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This is the aftermath of her artistry:

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Below is the final art hanging on the wall at my house:

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One of my favorite pieces of art that we own. I have her on our local artists wall. 🙂

Melati’s Favorite Spot

Melati is in the east enclosure with Chinta and Heran. She often prefers to be indoors and can often be found in her favorite spot on a platform at the far right of the enclosure, see below:

 

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I wanted to include a picture of Melati here, but most of the images I have were taken with a pretty bad phone. I’ve tried to get one a few times since creating this post, but they’ve either been bad photos or she was in another area when I was there. Hopefully, I will have better luck in the near future. Or maybe if anyone else has a good pic that they want to share?

Punta Tombo

Punta Tombo is a newly defined (December 2015) Protected Area (PA) on the coast of Argentina and is the largest nesting site for Magellanic Penguins in the world. These are close relatives of our Humboldt Penguins here at WPZ. See how similar they are below?

Magellanic Penguin

 

Humboldt Penguin

 

What I think is special about this PA is that it not only protects the land and costal area, but also the waters around it. As Professor Boersma from UW said “This has to be one of the few marine protected areas that’s saving prey species for these penguins — things like shrimp, anchovies and hake.” While this PA is newly defined in 2015, I believe the key factor for it’s ongoing success is protecting that area in which the penguins hunt for food, over the last decade penguins at Punta Tombo had to increase the distance travelled by 50 miles. Overfishing is one of the biggest threats to penguins.

Conversely, there is the Pingüino de Humboldt National Reserve. This is a protected area on the coast of Chile that is approximately 3 square miles in size (three!). This does not protect the area that the penguins hunt for food and because of this the competition with the fishing industry is one of their biggest threats (WAZA, n.d.;“Penguin (Humboldt) – Woodland Park Zoo Seattle WA,” n.d.). In addition to that pressure, they are also threatened by a nearby mining operation and the potential building of a nearby power plant.

Humboldt Penguins

The Woodland Park Zoo opened it’s state of the art Penguin exhibit in 2009 with just 20 Humboldt Penguins. They’ve been incredibly successful and last summer they hatched their 50th chick and sent many of them to other zoos around the country. This was all done under guidance of the Species Survival Plan (SSP). There are only about 12,000 Humboldt Penguins left in the wild and are classified as threatened, which is just shy of being considered endangered.

Penguins at Woodland Park Zoo

Notice the splotch of missing feathers on the penguin on the right? That penguin is shedding old feathers and growing in new ones, a process called molting.