On the Job: Salisbury Zoo
If you love animals, there’s a good chance you love the zoo. But given the chance, it’s a good bet not everyone would trade in their 9 to 5 for a zoo keeper gig considering what it entails. But this week on the job 47 ABC decided to take on the challenge and head to the Salisbury Zoo.
When you walk into the Salisbury Zoo you’re immediately surrounded by tall trees, lots of different animal exhibits and zoo keepers. And speaking of zoo keepers, Ian Shelley has been in the business for about 15 years. Our first job of the day was making diets, which means prepping food for the animals. Walking into the kitchen where it’s all done provided an interesting smell.
On feeding list were a few animals including otters, which get a mixture of fish meat and carrots, sun conures who get a fruit and nut mixture, and their very large bird, a curassow which gets beef. But not just any kind of beef, horse beef.
After our meal prepping was done, it was time to pack our wheelbarrow go feed the animals! While being a zoo keeper can seem really fun, there are parts of the job that aren’t so fun. Shelley tells 47 ABC, “You deal with aggression sometimes, you don’t spend any real length of time as a zoo keeper without getting bitten or scratched.”
Hopefully we won’t get bitten. Finally, we arrived at our first feeding job, the otters. But before breakfast we have to clean out their cage. After that’s all done, it’s feeding time! After spreading out a few fish, and some meat and carrots, we put a few fish inside a toy water bottle, which is used to keep the otters busy during the day.
Next up, it was time to head to the sun conure exhibit! Once inside, we had to fill two feeders with our fruit and nut mixture. As for the curassow, he got his horse meat. After we were done putting out the food, we had to rake the floors to clean up any excess peanut shells or bird poop. And the last step? Scrubbing the water pools.
After that, it was time to head over to a different type of bird exhibit, the swans. This job proved to be adorable because they had a brand new addition, a four week old baby swan! For this exhibit, we had to scrub and drain their small pond to get rid of any excess leaves and sand in the water.
Finally, our last task of the day, cleaning the alpaca’s space! And I think they were less than thrilled to have us in there. After raking up some alpaca poop, the job was done!
Next week 47 ABC heads to Laytons Chance Winery to bottle some wine.
