The most important part of the day as an exotic animal keeper is the morning. There is a lot of feeding and cleaning that needs to happen, but first on the job list is turning all of the lights on in the now “old” reptile house and “old” reptile encounter room (some of you may have been in here when doing farmer days or experiences with us) this includes all of the heating and UV lights that are in every enclosure. As you can see from the first photo, I am a little short for this and there are some areas where I have a little step stool and a couple of strategically placed chairs!
Once all of the lights are on in the buildings, I set to work prepping the morning meals for; the armadillos, the agoutis, the sulcatas, the parrots, the porcupine, the cloud rat and the meerkats. Wow! For todays meals the ‘dillos were getting boiled eggs for brekkie, the agoutis get a mix of root veg, fruit, greens and pellets, the sulcatas were getting a bag of salad, the parrots had a specific pellet food, the porcupine had a mix of pellets as well as a small variety of veg, the cloud rat had pellets and some veg and finally the meerkats first breakfast was some chopped celeriac and aubergine. This is a lot to get ready!
This is where a second team member is greatly appreciated, today the legendary Farmer Craig was with me and helped get all of this prepped and dished out to our hungry animals. We split the “dishing out” jobs so that one team member heads towards the armadillos and parrots etc and the other goes to the porcupine, cloud rat and meerkats. I prefer going out towards the armadillos as Ahmed has my heart. I always try and wake him up in a morning (often by spraying down his enclosure with water) to make sure he okay and make sure he eats his breakfast because sometimes the wild birds like to steal it from him! Ahmed loves a lie in so I don’t want him to miss out! Next I go up to the agoutis and scatter feed their food in their enclosure, oranges and sweet potatoes are their favourite foods.
Then I head up to the sulcatas and on a nice day like today I let them out into the main grassy part of the enclosure, Hulk is normally the first out. Then its back into the silver barn for the parrots, I like to hand feed a few pellets to them first and then tip the rest into their bowl and let them out into the outside part of their enclosure.
After all of this feeding, its time to catch up with farmer Craig and get to work on some glass cleaning in the state of the art exhibit, Reptiles of the World, making sure that (at least at the start of the day) the windows are ship shape and ready for all of you to get a great view of some of our fantastic animals including the crocs, willow and the cheeky bearded dragons. All water bowls in Reptiles of the World are cleaned and refilled and then the fish in the crocodile exhibit are fed. (Best job!!!)Then it’s off to meerkat feeding at 10:45 and then opening Reptiles of the World at 11am for all of you to enjoy.
The rest of the day is then filled with doing all of the water bowls in the “old” reptile house, live feeding everything according to their diet sheets, filling out every animals’ enclosure temperature sheet, doing the rest of the exotics animal talks, sometimes meeting some of you for animal encounters and cleaning out enclosures that need a freshen up.
All in all, it is a very busy day on the farm but I really enjoy it and the challenge of getting everything done on time! I feel so lucky to work with such an amazing variety of exotic animals. Its do nice to wake up looking forward to the exciting challenges ahead.
Farmer Elle
Exotic Team
