Shorter bursts of less coherent Durrell/Jersey pics coming

[urbpan]

Simon regards a monkey skeleton.




A specially built feeder for cranes (it excludes feeding from other birds, as well as rodents). A rodent bait station is placed directly below it.


A one-eyed, imprinted fledgling White-rumped Shama. I was being given a tour of an aviary, and we had to be careful not to step on this bird as it approached us begging.


A food bowl for a small bird. It is in another dish full of water to prevent insects from getting into the food. Probably this also discourages mice to some extent.

(I took these disparate photos in the same short period. Posting them here is going to help me organize my presentation about my class.)

Comments

[frith]

Our emu/wallaby/crane/kangaroo/peacock feeders are of the same design as you show in your picture, except that the crane feeder has a transparent plastic curtain over the hole to keep out the starlings. The curtain is a piece of thick flexible transparent plastic with the dangly part cut into strips.

[urbpan.livejournal.com]

I should talk to you more about zoo pest control issues. Your zoo seems to have some pretty good practices in place. Do you use any podium style feeders? I'm trying to solve a tricky problem feeding wildebeests.

[frith]

Cool! A black-capped chickadee in the comment form. 8^)

I'm a bit hazy on what you mean by a podium style feeder. We have used stainless steel troughs on legs as feeders for the flamingos, but hoofstock such as gnus are fed a measured quantity of "grain" twice daily in their holding areas. There is no pest problem because there are no left-overs. The whitetail deer were fed ad-lib but we haven't kept whitetail deer in years. So we even get away with preparing the evening ration several hours in advance -- the local avian fauna has not caught on yet or just doesn't find our hoofstock feed that interesting. Only the crows know that the Himalayan black bear gets dog chow scattered everywhere in the mornings and even then only a few crows make the effort to loiter and pilfer. The grackles lost interest in the flamingo feed years ago when we stopped feeding the 'breeder' type, but I think we might have a family of mallards dipping into the flamingo dish. Mice and the rare rat are trapped year-round. Cockroaches are abundant in the Afrika pavilon but less right now (we had a "fumigation" session last spring). Stable flies aren't too bad so far this year, maybe we are getting better at strategic spraying of insecticide on our hoofstock and in places the flies like to perch. I have five woild waskily wabbits eating the leftover hay in my hippo exhibit, but so far we haven't considered the rabbits, marmots, chipmunks, grey squirrels, red squirrels, killdeer and robins to be pests. Some animals are more equal than others.